


Bad Things Happen

by squirenonny



Series: Voltron: Duality [19]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (Proportionally heavier on the comfort than the hurt), Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Bad Things Happen Bingo, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2019-06-28 02:56:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 40,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15698712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: A collection of prompt fills for the Bad Things Happen Bingo--Dualityverse style. Chapters can be read independently and in any order. Prompt/characters will be in the chapter titles, with warnings and timeline notes in the author's notes for each chapter.





	1. Shiro & Akira: Communication Cut Off

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From anon: “if it hasn't been claimed, i would love to see akira & shiro for the prompt Communication Suddenly Cut Off, with akira unreachable!!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was going to concoct an entire scenario for this, but then I remembered that [Akira disappearing is already a thing.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15627765/chapters/36286416) So here: the fallout of Shiro waking up to find out that no one can get in touch with Akira. (Also check out the final chapter of Akira’s fic tomorrow for bonus comfort and fluff.)

"What do you mean Akira's gone?"

"I mean..." Matt trailed off, then made his way over to the table where Shiro had been eating breakfast. "We don't know what happened. Everything seemed to be going fine--all the readings look normal--Pidge was monitoring the whole process and everything. We just... lost the signal."

Shiro stared at Matt, then down at his toast, his stomach rebelling at the thought of forcing down any more. He'd woken on edge, every nerve on alert for danger. He'd figured it was just because Matt had never made it to bed last night, and Shiro wasn't used to sleeping alone. He'd go down after breakfast and pry Matt away from whatever project had made him forget the time.

Except he hadn't imagined the project in question would involve experimental teleportation getting his brother stranded god knew where, alone and without a way to contact the rest of the team.

"Shiro?" Matt's voice was small, and it snapped Shiro out of the terror-fueled haze that had stolen over his thoughts. He looked down, surprised in a vague sort of way to see that he'd dented the edge of the table with the force of his prosthetic's grip. Matt reached out, cautiously trailing his fingers across Shiro's forearm. "We're going to find him."

Shiro clenched his jaw, refusing to say anything until he remembered how to breathe. He wasn't sure if what came out would be terror or rage, but either way, Matt didn't deserve to have it flung in his face.

Akira was gone.

The enormity of that simple truth tore through Shiro's chest like a hurricane, ripping out pieces of him without regard for the damage it wrought. A vice had closed around his lungs, making breathing difficult, and Shiro couldn't keep his hands from shaking.

"Show me," he said.

Matt didn't put up a fight, just led Shiro down to the Green Lion's hangar, where Pidge, Hunk, and Ryner were already absorbed with something on Pidge's laptop screen. All three of them looked up when Shiro and Matt entered, and Pidge immediately stiffened. They had gone pale, their face scrunching up in the instant before they whirled around, curling in on themself as they returned their attention to their computer.

Hunk went on staring a moment longer, blinking furiously and opening his mouth every few seconds like he was trying to find something to say.

Shiro should reassure them.

Matt had given him enough of an explanation to make it clear that all three of them had been behind the experiment, but they hadn't meant any harm. It was just an accident, and Shiro knew that if Akira was here, he'd be tripping over himself to reassure them that it wasn't their fault.

Shiro couldn't make himself say the words. His brother was gone. Lost, injured, dead, captured by the Galra--

The vice around Shiro's chest squeezed tighter, and he could barely hear what Matt was saying as he pictured, in sudden, vivid detail, Akira coming face-to-face with one of Zarkon's princes. He wouldn't go down without a fight, but without backup, without transportation, without even a weapon, Akira wouldn't last. And then--

"We have to find him," Shiro whispered, and his voice sounded like he'd just run a marathon.

"We will," Matt promised. "None of us is going to give up until we have him back."

 _Be fast,_ Shiro wanted to say. _We need to find him before anyone else does._

* * *

He lingered in Green's hangar for a time, but there was nothing for him to do there. Nothing that wouldn't just slow the others down. So he left, extracting a promise from Matt and Ryner both to call him the second they found anything, then headed down to the training deck to work out his frustrations. He set the simulator to level nine and sank into the rhythm of battle.

At this level of difficulty, there was no time for distractions. It took all of his focus just to stay on top of his enemies--three of them, all armed with swords. A longsword or a spear might have been more use in this duel, or better yet a pistol or other ranged weapon, but Shiro wanted the rush of close combat. He extended his daggers from their wrist-mounted sheathes and charged in, yielding to battle instinct.

He was pure motion, spinning from one target to the next, diverting their attacks and using their momentum against them. He didn't slow, even when swords cleaved into his armor and tore gaping holes in the thin bodysuit underneath.

When his opponents fell, he called for more, and he took them down with the same mindless ferocity.

An hour in, his strength was flagging. He'd had to drop the difficulty to level eight, and even that was pushing his limits, but each time an enemy fell he only saw Akira, alone and bleeding, fed into the same Arena that had consumed Shiro, or strapped to a table and cut open while Haggar looked on.

Akira was fine. He had to be.

Shiro clung to that hope. Wherever Akira had ended up, the Empire was no more likely to find him than anyone else. He might be alone, he might have found friends. Even if danger found him, he might at least have time to hide, to prepare a defense.

But hopes and probabilities weren't enough to sustain Shiro, and so he threw himself against another wave of gladiator bots. His body protested, a hundred little cuts and bruises compounding beneath his armor. Legs shaking, arms screaming with every blow he blocked, he fought on. He knew he was being stupid, that he was only wearing himself down, and if Akira needed him, he was screwing himself over.

He didn't care. Akira was in danger, and Shiro couldn't do anything to help. If he had to punish himself to keep from falling apart, so be it.

There were always the cryopods.

The intercom on the wall buzzed, and Shiro reversed at once, dodging one last strike from a gladiator as he called an end to the training sequence. "I'm here," he said, breathing hard. "You found him?"

"...No." Matt hesitated. "Are you busy, though? Can you come down to Green's hangar?"

Shiro glanced over his shoulder at the gladiator bot, wincing as doing so aggravated his aching muscles. "I'll be right down."

* * *

"He's not dead."

Matt spoke the second Shiro walked through the doors, before Hunk or Pidge even noticed his arrival.

Shiro's steps dragged, time slowing as he searched Matt's face for signs of a lie.

"I thought you said you hadn't found him yet."

Matt hesitated. "We're... still looking. But he's not dead. Red is sure of it."

Shiro glanced toward Hunk, who looked just as sick to his stomach as he had last night, and Pidge, who only hunched their shoulders and glared even more intently at their computer screen. On the pile of beanbags against the wall, Keith and Lance were settled in, Lance apparently trying to get Keith to relax, and having little success.

Shiro turned back to Matt. "I thought Red couldn't sense him."

"Well..."

"She can't," Keith said. "But she keeps insisting that she'd know if he was dead."

Pidge's shoulders hitched higher, the frantic clatter of their keys faltering for a long moment before they picked it up again.

Mouth bone dry, Shiro wrenched his gaze away from Pidge and stared instead at Matt. "Is that all you called me here for?"

Matt's expression fractured, and guilt tore through Shiro's chest, but before he could apologize, Matt was shaking his head. "No--fuck, sorry. You're right. Allura said you'd been on the training deck for hours. She was getting worried. I thought a little bit of good news might help you..." He trailed off, gesturing vaguely at Shiro's battered state.

He looked horrible, he knew. Beaten all to hell and seconds from collapsing. He appreciated that Matt was trying to help, and in another situation his words might even have been a comfort, but right now Shiro couldn't bring himself to be optimistic.

It was his _brother_ out there, and Shiro would have gladly thrown himself back into the Arena if it meant keeping Akira safe.

With a sigh, Lance picked himself up, squeezing Keith's hand before he slithered off the pile of bean bags and stalked over to Shiro and Matt. "Allura's right to worry," he said, crossing his arms. "You look terrible, and all of you could use some sleep." He glared at the back of Pidge's head in particular, then clapped his hands. "Hunk, Pidge. Go take a nap. Matt, maybe you can get Keith to talk about this instead of spiraling. If not, sleep for you two, too. Shiro." He turned, and Shiro bristled, ready for a fight.

But Lance's expression softened, and he laid a hand on Shiro's shoulder. "Let's go get you cleaned up."

* * *

They headed to the med bay, and even though Shiro caught on quickly, Lance wouldn't let him duck out of it. Protests that he was fine were met with a hard stare, unimpressed, that left Shiro feeling like his mother had just found him playing in the mud and was unamused by his insistence that he didn't need a bath.

"You're hurt," Lance said, more serious than Shiro had ever heard him outside of battle. "You're not doing anyone any good in this state. Spend an hour in a pod, let it clear your head. Then we'll find some way for you to help."

Shiro laughed. "We're dealing with something beyond the scope of theoretical physics, Lance. There's nothing I _can_ do to help."

Lance rolled his eyes. "You think the others don't need someone to drag them away for food every now and then? You think you can't grab stuff for them, or be someone for them to bounce ideas off, or help Coran keep the ship running while he tries to help out with this as much as possible?"

"I--"

"If this was anyone else in this state, you'd be saying exactly the same thing," Lance said, his lip quirking upward. "Don't even lie."

Lance's words left Shiro speechless, and he flushed, meekly accepting the medsuit Lance handed him and going to change. Lance was right, of course--just as he was right about the cryopod. Once Shiro looked at himself without the armor, he had to admit he'd overdone it. More than just that.

"Thank you, Lance," Shiro said haltingly as he came out of the changing area. "I guess I'm not thinking straight."

Lance pulled him into a hug. "He's your brother. Of course you're not thinking straight. That's why you've got me to be your common sense. So come on. I'll have a list from Coran by the time you get out."

Shiro followed without a word, even though a part of him still felt like putting himself under, no matter how necessary, was selfish. He didn't deserve to rest until Akira was home.

(Fortunately, it was hard to keep up those thoughts once the pod began its cycle, and Shiro slid rapidly into a much-needed rest.)

* * *

Shiro wasn't alone when he woke up, which was probably for the best. Even before he'd regained his balance, he felt a familiar, frantic energy welling up inside him. Akira. He had to find Akira.

It wasn't Lance who was there waiting, though, catching his arm as he tried to sprint out the door.

"Slow down," Karen Holt ordered, steering him away from the door and toward the adjacent med bay, where Matt and Pidge were already waiting, Matt collapsed in on himself on an exam table, Pidge prowling the edges of the room like a caged tiger looking for an escape route. "Sit."

Shiro stared at Karen for a moment, dumbfounded, but the quirk of her eyebrow dared him to argue, and he decided he was better off listening to her advice, for now. He sat beside Matt, who offered him a water pouch and a weak smile.

"Thanks," Shiro said. "Is everything okay?"

"Mandatory down-time," Pidge said, pulling open drawers and cabinets at random to examine their stock. "When Lance got back and realized we hadn't listened to his nap demands, he dragged Hunk down to the kitchen to help with dinner, and Mom roped us into..." They waved a hand vaguely at the med bay. "Whatever this is."

"Group therapy?" Matt suggested wryly, and Shiro reached down to take his hand. There was strain around his eyes Shiro hadn't noticed earlier. Strain, and an underlying guilt that pulled his face taut. Shiro had been so caught up in his own panic nothing else sank in.

"This isn't your fault," Shiro said, and the way both Matt and Pidge stiffened at his words, spines straightening like he'd just delivered an electric shock, said he'd guessed right. Karen smiled at Shiro, who intertwined his fingers with Matt's and squeezed, waiting until Matt looked up at him before pulling him into a hug. "I'm serious. Don't beat yourself up over this."

"I won't if you won't," Matt shot back, which was a cheap shot, but infuriatingly fair all at once. One of them had just come out of a cryopod, after all, and it wasn't the one Shiro was giving a pep talk.

Karen sighed, balling a spare blanket up around her arms as she took a seat on the end of the exam table. She glanced at Pidge, and Shiro could practically see her debating whether or not it was worth a fight to get them to stop wandering and join the others on the exam tables.

"I know this is hard for you," she said at length, staring at her lap. "I know you all want to work yourselves to exhaustion just in case it brings him back a single second sooner. I know you don't want to leave the hanger, just in case something changes while you aren't looking."

A jar full of plastic sticks that reminded Shiro of tongue depressors clattered to the ground, its contents spilling everywhere. Pidge seemed not to notice the noise or the mess; they were staring at Karen with wide, hurt eyes. After a moment, they noticed Shiro staring and flushed, hastily collecting the scattered sticks and dumping them all on the countertop beside the half-empty jar. Then they hunched their shoulders and slunk over to the table, hopping up to sit beside Shiro.

Shiro frowned at them, then at Matt, who was wholly focused on Karen. "What...?"

She looked up, forcing a smile. "After I got the call saying there had been a disruption in the _Persephone_ 's signal, it was three days before they officially announced your deaths. Three days of sitting by the phone, waiting for a call that never came. Three days of calling everyone I could think to call in hopes that someone would have more information. So, I understand. I understand how hard it is to not know."

Shiro stared at her, his heart sinking. He hadn't thought much about the aftermath of the Kerberos disaster from the point of view of the people back on Earth. He knew Akira had been told they'd all died. He knew there had been a coverup.

He'd never stopped to imagine what it must have been like when the news first broke.

"Mom," Matt said, his voice brittle. He reached out for Karen, who gave a teary smile and leaned into him. Shiro turned the other way, to where Pidge sat with their arms wrapped around their legs, glaring at the far wall. They stiffened when Shiro placed a hand on their back, then glanced his way, tears welling in their eyes.

Cursing, they turned away again almost instantly and wiped their eyes on their sleeve. "Akira got me through a lot of that," they said. "Not the very start. I didn't meet him til the memorial. But everything that came after. We both knew the Garrison was up to some shady shit, and we talked about it. A lot. He thought you'd been stranded on Kerberos, and he kept saying you'd Mark Watney your way out of whatever had happened until the Garrison could mount a rescue mission."

"That does sound like something he'd say." Shiro slid his arm around Pidge's shoulders, pulling them into a one-armed hug, and they didn't fight it.

Pidge sniffled once, squeezing Shiro around the middle. "No offense to you guys _or_ Mark Watney? But none of you have anything on Akira." They craned their head back, grinning through their tears. "Wherever he is, he's probably doing something weird, stupid, and more than a little dangerous, and it's going to keep him alive until we find him and bring him home."

It was little more than a fantasy, the idea of Akira pulling one reckless stunt after another, but it was comforting--even if it was obvious to everyone in the room that Pidge didn't believe their own words. Not entirely. With a sad smile, Shiro reached up to ruffle Pidge's hair. "You're right," he said. "Maybe we should eat potatoes until he gets home. Out of solidarity."

They stared at him for a brief moment, one hand going to protect their hair. Then they burst out laughing--helpless little giggles, interspersed with sniffles. Matt squeezed his hand, offering a smile when Shiro turned his way.

"We're going to get him back," Matt said. "I swear we will."

Shiro shut his eyes and tried to believe it.

 _We'll find you, Akira,_ he thought. _We're not going to give up until you're home.  
_


	2. Alluri: Worked Themself to Exhaustion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous asked, "Allura/Meri 'Worked Themself to Exhaustion' for the Bad Things Happen Bingo?" 
> 
> Spoilers through Chapter 31 of Shadows of Stars. Chapter 34 provides some useful additional context for this chapter, but you won't find any actual spoilers for that chapter here. Set sometime nebulously in the future, relative to the most recent update.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter has been a long time coming. Combination of work stress, lack of inspiration, and general Life. I've got another one just waiting on edits, so hopefully that will be up soon. Three others are started, but two of those contain major spoilers for the end of _Shadows of Stars_ , sooooo I can't promise how quickly more updates will be coming.
> 
> Fun story about this one, though. I've worked 10 of the last 11 days and missed my lunch break on two of those days (yayyyy Thanksgiving week at a grocery store~) Anyway, I was dead tired all this week and couldn't focus on any of my WIPs, so I scrolled through my list of BTH prompts and this one sparked my interest.
> 
> Got 500 words into it before realizing _why_ "Worked Themself to Exhaustion" might be striking a chord. |D
> 
> Anyway, no major trigger warnings for this chapter, just discussions of PTSD and a brief reference to past torture.

Allura found Meri on the bridge several hours past midnight, standing at one of the computer terminals near Coran's station, backlit by a frosty blue glow.  
  
"Are you still up?"

Meri jumped at the sound of her voice, then tried to cover with a laugh. "Allura! You scared me."  
  
Allura crossed the bridge to where she stood, pulling her dressing gown closer as she walked. She hooked her chin over Meri's shoulder and peered at the screen. "Working on something important?"  
  
Meri shrugged with the shoulder that wasn't currently supporting Alllura's chin. "Nothing terribly interesting," she said. "Just going through reports from the Accords and stuff."  
  
"Couldn't that wait till tomorrow?"  
  
Meri shrugged again, tension creeping into her spine. Allura tipped her head to the side, studying Meri's face in profile. She looked tired. She had since she'd returned from her stint as a spy, but it showed now more than ever. The screen's light only deepened the inky shadows beneath her eye and accentuated the lines pulling at the corners of her eyes, and her hair hung limp around her face, the way it did when she'd gone too long without a shower. Except in the immediate aftermath of a battle or other emergency, Allura couldn't remember ever seeing Meri so not put together.  
  
Spying had changed her. Allura didn't know the details of it; Meri had remained tight-lipped on anything that wasn't actionable information. The projects Haggar was working on, the abilities of the druids, whatever she'd managed to dig up in digital records or in conversation with other druid candidates--all of this Meri shared freely and with little inflection.  
  
It gave away more than she probably wanted to admit to, but she studiously ignored any probing questions into her own well-being. She'd done what she had to to maintain her cover, and that was all she'd say on the matter.  
  
Allura wrapped her arms around Meri's waist, pressing flush against her back. Meri instantly tensed, every line of her like stone in Allura's embrace. Allura frowned, sneaking another look at Meri's face. Lit from beneath by the display screen, it looked even more gaunt than ever, her eyes dull and distant.  
  
"Why don't you step away for a while?" Allura asked, trying not to put any judgement into the question. "Come get some sleep, start fresh in the morning. I'll help?"  
  
Meri gave an awkward shrug, her eyes never leaving the screen. She reached out mechanically to navigate the menus, and Allura idly followed her progress. She wasn't doing anything any more involved than she'd said. Just cataloging distress calls, routing memos from the Accords and the paladins' allies, approving maintenance reports and other minutiae of castle upkeep. She did it all with that same stiff posture, remaining rigid in Allura's arms. Maybe it was just Allura imagining things, but she seemed to actually be leaning away from her touch.  
  
"Meri?" Allura asked. She hesitated, all her diplomatic training failing her as she found she had no idea how to ask what she wanted to.  
  
Meri preempted her by turning around, a smile softening her face. It was a convincing smile, too. It even reached her eyes to crinkle them at the corners in the way that was so utterly _Meri_. But they were close enough that Allura could sense the faint currents of Quintessence running beneath her skin. Meri had shifted her features to produce this smile. If she wanted to, Allura could have reached out and cut the strands of Quintessence, forcing Meri out of the shift.  
  
She held off, but it wasn't respect for Meri's privacy that stayed her hand so much as a fear of what she would find underneath the perfect smile. How broken was Meri, that she couldn't even force a smile on her own face?  
  
"Sorry, 'Lura," Meri said. "I really should get this done tonight. Don't feel like you need to wait up for me, though. I know you've got an early day tomorrow."  
  
It was a dismissal, clear as day, and it stung enough that Allura couldn't scrounge together a response. She just gaped at Meri, fighting against her hurt and indignation. This wasn't about her. She couldn't lose sight of that. This was about Meri, hurting and upset and ashamed of it all for some reason Allura couldn't fathom, except that she knew what Meri looked like when she was punishing herself.  
  
She'd looked very much like this in the aftermath of Allura's mother's death. Freshly bonded to Blue, she'd withdrawn, building up a facade of strength and indifference in an attempt to be what she thought everyone expected her to be. She hadn't known how to build shifts like this back then, but Allura thought she would have worn them if she could. She'd never wanted to add her baggage to other people's.  
  
Meri didn't wait for Allura to find her voice. She just turned back to her busy work, shutting Allura out entirely. Allura could have pressed, could have turned this into a fight, but that wasn't what she wanted. It wasn't what either of them wanted, she suspected. In Meri's eyes, she probably thought she was sparing Allura the worse pain.  
  
With a heavy heart and a tongue that felt like cotton in her mouth, Allura retreated. She would talk to Coran in the morning. He might have some advice for her on what to do to help.

* * *

Coran wished he could say he was surprised when Allura came to him about Meri, but of all the ways to describe how he felt about this complicated nest of emotions, shock was not one of them. He was, after all, adjunct to the Blue Lion. He'd felt Meri's torment since long before she returned to the castle.  
  
Allura had been waiting outside his room when he woke for his morning duties--an early call even for Allura, who had always hated wasting the day away by sleeping in. She'd been dancing on her toes, clearly battling herself over whether or not to knock on his door and risk rousing him early.  
  
One look at Allura told him all he needed to know, especially coupled with the groggy malaise he sensed from Meri's direction. She wasn't asleep, though he thought she might have been trying. For once.  
  
"It's going to take time," he told Allura once she'd finished pouring out all her concerns. He'd ushered her back into his room and sat her on the edge of his bed, sending off a quick message while he fetched the down comforter that had always been her favorite. Something had come up, he told the ranking officer on the bridge, and he would be late to his usual rounds. "I know you were hoping for a better answer, and I wish I had one to give you."  
  
Allura sighed, pulling the corners of the blanket tight at her throat and leaning on Coran's shoulder. "I just want to be able to help her. I know she's hurting. Why won't she let me see it?"  
  
That was a complicated question with a complicated answer, and Coran didn't think Allura needed him to say so. She knew as well as anyone how hard it could be to admit weakness, even to a loved one. How long had she carried her grief for her father close to her own heart before she let the other paladins see her mourning?  
  
And this situation with Meri was more complicated still. Coran had seen glimpses of it in Thace, and he'd felt whole volumes from Meri through the bond. Considering that this insight was somewhat ill-gotten gains--and especially considering she'd pushed him away as much as she pushed away everyone else, to the point that Coran hadn't been able to tell her properly what it meant for him to be her adjunct... Well, he wasn't about to go telling Allura everything he'd inferred.  
  
"She's been through a terrible ordeal," Coran said. "I don't know the full of it, but I know she probably needs time to process. All you can do is be there for her. Remind her that she's not alone anymore. Then when she's ready to talk, she'll know who to turn to."  
  
Allura's sigh said she'd already known what it was she had to do, but she didn't like the idea of sitting around waiting for something beyond her power.  
  
That was fair. Coran didn't like waiting, either.  
  
 So an hour later, after he'd coaxed Allura back to bed to catch up on the sleep she'd lost fretting over Meri, Coran himself went to find his insomniac paladin.  
  
She was down on the training deck, apparently haven given up on resting. She didn't notice him come in, and watching her sluggish movements as she took on a training bot--fairly low-leveled compared to her usual fare--Coran had to wonder just how much sleep she'd missed since her return last week. The shadows under her eyes were darker than he remembered from even just last night, her skin dry and waxen, her hair a limp mess. And she was moving slow, too. It wasn't the sluggishness of someone nearing the end of an intense workout. Meri quite simply couldn't track the training bot's movements, which meant that it kept catching her by surprise with its attacks.  
  
Coran winced as she took a blow to the ribs, staggering back with a soft grunt of pain. Her face screwed up in frustration and rage, and she launched herself at the gladiator, foregoing the staff she'd selected for this session in favor of a more... hands-on approach.  
  
Quintessence flared bright around her fingers, crackling in the air like a living thing and filling up the space between Coran and her. He couldn't read the currents to know her intent, but her hand sank into the gladiator's chest panel. The robot froze at once, its joints locking up, and an uncharacteristically vindictive smile flashed across Meri's face as she yanked her hand back and let the gladiator fall.

The crash of metal rang loud in the sudden silence, and Coran wasted no time in stepping forward. Better to announce himself than to have Meri notice and wonder if he'd been intentionally spying.  
  
"You're up early."  
  
She whirled toward him, horror dawning on her face for a brief moment before it was smoothed over--quite literally. If he hadn't seen the transformation, he never would have guessed that Meri had donned a shift, but there was nothing natural about the way the panic in her eyes glossed over to bland disinterest, or the way her skin and hair brightened minutely, lessening the appearance of neglect and exhaustion. Even the slump of her shoulders eased by way of a subtle shift in bone structure.  
  
Coran's stomach turned at the sight--or perhaps that was the coil of fear reaching him through the bond, stronger even than the shame and guilt twisting Meri's insides into knots.  
  
"Coran!" she said brightly. "Hey! Yeah. Figured I'd start the day off right. Haven't been able to keep up with my training lately, what with all the..." She trailed off, her manufactured smile dulling somewhat as anxiety wrapped around her throat. Coran felt it like it was his own emotion, and he had to swallow before he could speak. Even then, it came out strangled.  
  
"Of course. Let me know if you ever need a sparring partner." He grinned at her startled blink. "What? I'm not an old man just yet. And I need to be on my toes, what with the whole adjunct situation."  
  
She hummed, clearly too distracted to pick up on the hint Coran was trying to give her. He sighed, contemplating how else he might broach the subject of her emotional state. She was so on edge he knew she wouldn't respond well to a direct approach, and the last thing he wanted was to make her shut him down. She needed friends now more than anything.  
  
"Do you have plans for the rest of the day, then?" he asked instead, graciously bypassing her obvious exhausted stupor.  
  
She shrugged. "I finished the signoffs last night. Went through most of the backlog of Coalition memos, too. There's a few you or Allura will have to take a look at, but..." She trailed off, tightening her mouth around a yawn.  
  
Coran wished she would just admit how tired she was--or at least admit what it was that was keeping her from sleep. It felt wrong to ignore the yelmore in the room when he could have punctured her facade without much effort.  
  
But that wasn't what it meant to be the blue adjunct. He knew what his paladins needed, and what Meri needed right now wasn't more guilt on top of what she had already piled on herself. To have churned through so much work last night--Coran, better than anyone, knew just how much of a slog that would have been. He was amazed she hadn't fallen asleep at the console halfway through the fiftieth dull report from an ally somewhere.  
  
"Well," he said brightly, clapping his hands together. "Thank you for clearing that off my plate. If it's not too much to ask of you, perhaps I could get your help with a few more tasks?"  
  
A flush of pride briefly overtook Meri at Coran's thanks--far too much pride for such a simple thing, and it spoke to the depth of her self-loathing. Even more baffling was the staggering sense of relief that answered his request for help. Coran took a page from Meri's book and applied a touch of a shift to his face to conceal his alarm. He wasn't as practiced at it as Meri, and he was sure there were flaws in his shift--he'd never been the best at crafting new forms for himself, and he'd never attempted a partial shift like this before.  
  
Thankfully, Meri was too tired to scrutinize him too closely. She crossed the training room to retrieve her discarded staff, nearly toppling over in the attempt. She caught herself on the wall, freezing for a moment as a flood of heat washed through her. She was keenly aware of Coran's eyes on her; he could feel her self-consciousness and averted his eyes before he realized what he was doing, but even knowing its source, he couldn't make himself look directly at her until she'd stowed the staff in the weapons rack and joined him by the door.  
  
She wove a bit as she walked with him toward the elevator, fatigue written in every line of her body. She didn't offer any conversation, and he didn't try to tease it out of her. She looked like she might fall asleep standing up--and, in all honesty, Coran would have been glad of it. He didn't feel her exhaustion, exactly. It wasn't carried through the bond like true emotions. But there was a thick haze over her mood, dampening her emotions and heightening those few flashes that broke through the muddle, and trying to adjust himself to it all did give him a taste of what she must have been feeling.  
  
She didn't ask where they were going. If Coran had to guess, he would say she didn't care. It seemed to Coran she just wanted something to keep her moving. To keep her awake.  
  
He wondered if it was dreams that were bothering her.  
  
He reminded himself, again, that she didn't owe him answers, and let the silence swell as they neared their destination. He'd contemplated several options for the first step of what was sure to be a long journey to healing for Meri. She needed sleep, certainly, and he'd briefly entertained the idea of taking her up to the map room in the hopes that the low lighting and peaceful atmosphere might coax her into an involuntary nap.  
  
It seemed a little heavy-handed, especially as he couldn't be sure it would be worth the effort. He might well only succeed in stoking Meri's resentment before she stalked off to less lulling pursuits. So instead, he'd opted for a simpler deception. He'd asked Thace to join them in one of the equipment storage rooms for a routine systems check on the supply of BLIP-tech drones. It was a suitably voluminous task to justify having three people assigned to it, but straight-forward enough that it didn't require the attention of someone trained in the upkeep of complex machines. All that was really required was a visual inspection of the casing for damage or corrosion and a manual verification of the last self-check.  
  
Thace didn't know anything of the troubles Meri had been facing--at least, not more than he might have inferred because of his own history with espionage. Coran hadn't asked him to speak with Meri, nor had he told him that he had arranged for Zelka to call him away half an hour into the task. It didn't make this any less meddling, but at least he wasn't conspiring on top of that.

Besides, he couldn't very well have just asked Meri to go see Thace. Coran had long suspected she was deliberately avoiding Thace, and the way she stiffened when she saw him waiting inside the storage bay lent credence to that theory. Her steps slowed, her shift slipping momentarily as she visibly weighed the benefits of simply walking out of the room.  
  
She eventually decided to see it through, though her reluctance was strong enough to slow Coran's steps, too, and he shook himself, clapping his hands briskly as he entered the room. "Well!" he said, sending a silent apology to Thace, who had startled at the sudden noise. "Now that we're all here, let's get started, shall we?"  
  
It took only a few moments to demonstrate the checks, and then they were all off, working their way down separate rows at their own pace. Meri lagged behind the other two, moving on autopilot and struggling to stay awake, but Coran didn't call her on it. They were spread far enough apart that conversation was unnecessary and somewhat awkward, so they worked in companionable silence until Zelka called and Coran took his leave.  
  
He only prayed that Thace could help Meri where the rest of them couldn't.

* * *

Meri silently cursed Coran for leaving her alone with Thace, and then felt immediately guilty for the thought. There was nothing at all wrong with Thace. He was a good man, and the advice and resources he'd provided her with when she left on her ill-informed espionage mission had probably saved her life several times over. It had certainly enabled some of her more idiotic decisions, but that was hardly his fault.  
  
It also wasn't his fault being around him reminded her too much of her time in Haggar's inner circle. He had a way about him, a vigilance even soldiers like Shiro and Keith couldn't match. He was aware of his surroundings at all times, wary of potential threats, but he also watched with an eye that was well practiced at looking below the surface. He didn't have to stare for her to feel as though she were being picked apart.  
  
The only saving grace in this situation was that he was two rows over and Coran had promised to make this as quick as he could. With luck, he'd return from helping Zelka in ten or twenty minutes, and Meri could go back to shuffling along like a zombie and trying not to pass out in the middle of her inspection.  
  
Quiznak. She was so _tired_.  
  
She shook her head, though, shoving away her exhaustion, and kept moving. She finished ten drones, then twenty, and still Coran hadn't returned. Thirty drones on, she looked up to see Thace approaching down the next row. He was focused on his task, but his proximity raised an alarm in her bones. Someone was here. She couldn't let her guard down. She never had found a way to confirm whether or not her shifts held while she slept, and if he saw something he wasn't supposed to--  
  
Meri caught herself following familiar old tracks of paranoid thought and stopped where she was, staring at her reflection in the polished shell of the BLIP-tech drone. What was she talking about? She wasn't on the _Eryth_ anymore. She was among friends, and she didn't need to worry about someone seeing that she was an Altean.  
  
A purple cast had crept into her hand while she was drowning in pointless panic, and she banished that, too, mentally checking herself for any other Galra traits that might have slipped through. It had happened at least once a day since she'd returned--fangs, fur, purple pigmentation. Once she'd fully shifted her ears to the longer, floppier version she'd used as part of her Reza shift.  
  
Thace continued working as he drew near to Meri, not looking up from the screen in front of him.  
  
"Have you ever tried krebu?"  
  
Meri lifted her head to frown at Thace. Logic said he was talking to her. After all, there was no one else in the room. Still, her tired mind couldn't quite grasp the concept of conversation.  
  
"What?" she finally said, eloquently.  
  
Thace had enough tact not to comment on her mental state. "It's a tea," Thace said. "Old Galra recipe--though perhaps not as old as we like to pretend."  
  
Meri cracked a smile at that, the expression pulling at muscles that she swore she hadn't used in months. "I imagine a lot of things seem old until you meet someone from ten thousand years ago. It's good?"  
  
"A little bland for my taste, but I suppose that's the point."  
  
"The... point?"  
  
"It's a common remedy among civilian families. A lot of my men grew up with a parent or grandparent who liked to prescribe it for all sorts of ails. Nadezda swears by it. Personally, I find it hard to believe a few herbs can do all that people claim it can. It _is_ good for insomnia, though. Better than anything else I've tried."  
  
Suspicion came roaring back in, popping Meri's bubble of complacency. She reinforced her placid partial shift on instinct before Thace's last statement clicked into place.  
  
"You too, huh?" she asked, well aware that she was admitting her own weakness. Well, a piece of it, at any rate. But Thace had a nonjudgmental air about him and, more importantly, there was just enough distance between them for it not to feel like a threat. It wasn't like with Allura and Coran, or even Lance and Rosa. She didn't-- Well, it wasn't that she didn't _care_ what Thace thought of her. She just didn't think he'd known her long enough to have expectations for her to live up to.  
  
Thace smiled. "Ever since I left the Accords," he said softly.  
  
Something passed between them in those few words. An understanding, of sorts, that went beyond the insomnia. He'd been there. He'd done things to maintain his cover--awful, horrible things. Things that haunted him. Things he regretted, and had regretted from the moment he did them, but he'd done them all the same because the mission mattered more than one solitary person's conscience.  
  
The tears took her by surprise, as did most emotion these days. It snuck up on her, stealing her breath, and she turned back to her work before Thace could see her tearing up. She tried to breathe, but breathing only widened the cracks in her composure, so that left her holding her breath and squeezing her eyes shut, as though by forcing the tears out faster she could reach the end of this hysteria sooner.  
  
Hysteria. She almost had to laugh at the fact that this was the word her mind had conjured to describe herself, when she'd always hated the way it was so often slung to undermine someone's emotional turmoil. To cheapen it. But she'd impersonated a druid, participated in the interrogation and torture of Imperial prisoners, risked death on a daily basis, and now here she was, crying over _tea._ Maybe hysteria _was_ an apt word, in this case.  
  
"How do you do it?" she asked, hating the way her voice shook but unable to stop the words pouring out of her mouth. Thace remained quiet, waiting for her to elaborate, and she waved her hand in the air, using the gesture as an excuse to wipe her cheeks. She still stared at the pod in front of her. "After everything we've seen, everything we've done, how are we supposed to go back to the way things were?"  
  
"Slowly," Thace said, frankly, "and with the support of people who are better than us." He shifted, and when Meri finally turned, she found he had given up all pretense of keeping busy and was watching her now--with sympathy, yes, but also with an ache she knew all too well. "Is it the memories?"  
  
"No." Meri hesitated. "...Yes _and_ no. Not memories as such. Just..." She turned away, a lump rising in her throat. "It's like it's not my mind that's stuck back there so much as my body. I couldn't... I never slept through the night while I was there. I was too afraid someone would walk in and notice something off about my shift." Her voice wavered, and she cursed herself, wiping her eyes now with both hands. There was nothing subtle about it, but Thace was far too perceptive to have missed the signs of an impending breakdown, anyway, and she just didn't have the energy to keep pretending. "I don't have to worry about that now. I shouldn't-- I _want_ to sleep, but every time I try I wake up an hour later in a panic. It was worse when I tried to sleep in Allura's bed. It was-- She was _there_ , and there was a part of me that thought she was the enemy."

Remembering that moment, remembering the way she'd reached for a weapon, the way she'd come so close to lashing out, to attacking the one person who mattered more to her than anything else in the universe--

Meri choked on a sob, shaking her head to dislodge the what-ifs that had been haunting her ever since. "When I wake up like that, I can't just go back to sleep. I'm up for another eight hours or more, and the only thing I can do is try to go until I'm about to drop and hope the exhaustion buys me an extra twenty minutes or so before it all starts over again."  
  
Her vision had blurred so much by now that she could hardly make Thace out across the row of drones, but he approached slowly, telegraphing his moves. Meri hated that she was so fragile he felt he had to treat her like a wounded animal, but she couldn't pretend she wasn't scared of how she might have reacted otherwise. She didn't expect him to trust her when she couldn't even trust herself.  
  
Instead, though, she remained where she was as he approached, his arms spread in a silent invitation. Of all the people in the castle who might have offered her a hug, Thace was pretty far down on the list, but coming from him it didn't feel so much like pity. She teetered on the edge for a moment, then fell against him, turning all her focus toward her breathing in a desperate attempt not to fall apart completely in his arms.  
  
"I'm sorry," Meri whispered, turning her forehead into his shoulder. She wasn't sure what she was apologizing for--crying on the lapels of his uniform? Or having this breakdown on him, instead of _literally_ anyone else? She had a whole castle full of people with more reasons than Thace to care about her bullshit.  
  
Thace only hummed, an echo of a melody in the sound. "You have nothing to apologize for. Your actions saved a great deal more people than they harmed. It will get easier to see that, with time."  
  
Meri scrunched her face up as the flow of tears increased. "I know," she said, not knowing if it was the truth. "I just wish I'd been better."  
  
"Be better _now_ ," Thace said. "That's all you can do. And remember, this team you have... They don't know the things we know. I pray they never have to learn. But they know a thing or two about healing a fractured spirit... Coran knows the weight of regret as well as us, in his own way."  
  
Meri snorted with a sudden realization, then felt immediately silly for not having seen it before now. Vrekt, she really was tired. "He didn't just 'get called away,' did he?"  
  
Thace hummed again, one hand rubbing circles on her back. "I very much doubt it. For what it's worth, I didn't figure it out until he got the call, either."  
  
"Well... It kind of worked out, in the end," Meri admitted. She lingered in Thace's embrace for another moment, then pulled back. "Thanks. And... I'm sorry. I don't want to burden you with all of my drama."  
  
"It's not a burden to offer a little sympathy every now and again," Thace said. "I'm sure Allura and Coran would say the same."  
  
"I don't know if I can talk about it with them. Not yet."  
  
Thace smiled. "Then tell them that. They'll understand. The wonderful thing about comfort is that it doesn't require exhaustive knowledge of the context. They already know you're hurting; that's enough to start. Tell them what you can, and tell them that you're not ready for the rest, and then just... go from there."  
  
Tell them what she could, huh? Meri wasn't sure what that was, but she was long past the point of having enough energy to keep running from the darkness of her own mind. She just wanted to feel _safe_ in her own body again. "Okay," she said. "I'll try." She wiped her eyes again, and pulled back to stand beside the next BLIP-tech drone in the row. She hesitated before beginning her inspection, however, and opened her mouth to ask a question that never came.  
  
"Go on," Thace said. "I don't think you need to stay here any longer." He glanced sidelong at his own drone. "If Coran actually needs this to be done, I'm sure he can find someone else to help him."  
  
"Punishing him for tricking you?" Meri asked with a feeble smile.  
  
Thace chuckled. "If he asks, I'll tell him we figured out what he actually wanted us to do and came to the logical conclusion that nothing else was required of us."  
  
Meri shook her head, but she wasn't going to complain about getting the rest of the day off. Her little miniature breakdown had worn her out faster than three hours on the training deck. She might actually make it a full two hours before she woke this time. She nodded to Thace and took a single step toward the door, then stopped again.  
  
"Actually...."  
  
"Krebu?" Thace asked with a knowing smile. "I stole some while we were on homeworld. Would you care to join me for a cup?"  
  
Meri smiled, a weight lifting from her shoulders. "I'd like that very much."

* * *

Allura got another hour of sleep before giving up the effort. A very large part of her wanted to go find Meri--not that she knew what she would do after that point. Her conversation with Coran kept rattling around in her head. Be there for Meri, but don't push. It was a delicate balance to strike, especially for someone like Allura, who by her nature wanted to _fix_ problems, not merely commiserate.  
  
Unfortunately, Coran was right. This wasn't a problem she could fix. There was no clever solution she could propose that would mend all of Meri's hurts, and until Meri reached a point where she was ready to ask for help, there was very little Allura could do. But she would commiserate until the end of time if that was what Meri needed. It would be better than trying to help and getting pushed away again.  
  
Apparently she had time to come to terms with the gentle approach, though, because Meri seemed to have finally gone in search of sleep--or at the very least, she wasn't in any of her usual haunts, new or old. No in any of her favorite places--the synthetic hot springs at the top of Blue Tower, the observation deck where they'd spent so many evenings watching the stars. She wasn't with Blue, either, and Lance hadn't seen her all morning. But she wasn't on the bridge or the training deck either. She may have been in her room, but if she was, Allura was loathe to disturb her.  
  
Allura stifled her disappointment and returned to the observation deck to think. It was good that Meri had allowed herself to take a break. She needed all the rest she could get. It did leave Allura feeling rather useless, however. Coran had told her to take the morning off, which meant she still had several hours before he expected her on the bridge. She supposed she could go find Shiro and see what else needed to be done today.  
  
She contemplated doing just that, but she'd already settled in on the cushioned bench beside the large, round window, a blanket draped over her lap and a mound of pillows behind her. It was a cozy little nest (not as cozy as it would have been with Meri beside her, but some things were outside of Allura's control), and she was reluctant to move.  
  
She wasn't sure how long she sat there, watching the slow drift of stars as the castle-ship drifted through space, but it was long enough that she'd begun to drift herself, her mind falling into that pleasant, weightless warmth right on the edge of sleep.  
  
The door hissing opened startled her awake, and she scrubbed at crusty eyes as she turned to see who had found her.  
  
Meri stood in the doorway, a sweater in the human style pulled over her rumpled uniform. She had a steaming mug in each hand, bags under her eyes, and a shy smile on her face.  
  
"Meri!" Allura stood, tripping over her blanket. She was wide awake now--wide awake and filled with directionless energy. She wanted to say something to Meri, but she didn't know what. Didn't know why Meri had come to find her, after spending the last week trying her best to avoid being alone together.  
  
Meri closed the distance between them first, holding out one of her mugs to Allura. "I brought you some cocoa," she said. "Rosa's recipe."  
  
"Oh," Allura said, staring dumbly at the mug. "Thank you."  
  
They stood there awkwardly for a few moments longer, Meri staring into her own mug, which looked more like tea than cocoa, Allura watching Meri for a sign of what she wanted Allura to do. She looked more vulnerable than she had last night, like she'd finally decided to let her guard down, but Allura didn't want to ruin that by asking probing questions.  
  
"Do you... Do you want to watch the stars with me?" Allura finally asked.  
  
Meri's answering smile lit a bonfire in Allura's chest, and they settled in together on the bench by the window, shoulders pressed together, the blanket spread over both their laps. The cocoa was delicious, and it spread the warmth throughout Allura's body, soothing some of her nerves.  
  
"I'm sorry I've been so distant," Meri said, both hands wrapped around her mug. She stared out at the stars, the soft blue glow of the room's emergency lighting catching in her hair, which was still damp from a recent shower. The light softened her, washing away the marks of her experiences in Haggar's circle.  
  
Allura laid a hand on her arm. "You don't need to apologize, Meri. You've been through a lot. You're allowed to take some time to adjust."  
  
Meri gave her a watery smile, laying her own hand atop Allura's. "Thanks. I... I know you want to help, and you deserve to know everything. I just... I don't know when I'll be ready to talk about it. It's all too fresh right now. Is it okay if we just... sit... for a while? I've missed you."  
  
"I missed you, too," Allura said, squeezing Meri's wrist. "We can do whatever you like. You know I'll always be here for you."  
  
Meri's face crumpled, and she gave a self-conscious laugh as Allura pulled her into a hug. "I'm sorry," she said, her voice hitching. "I just... You shouldn't promise things when you don't have all the information."  
  
Allura's throat constricted, and she carefully set aside their two mugs--her still mostly full, Meri's down to the dregs. She turned, cradling Meri's cheek in the palm of hand and gently turning her head until their eyes met. "You're right that I don't know everything you've done," she said, bringing up her other hand to curl around the back of meri's neck, her fingers tangling in the short, fine hairs at the base of her skull. "But I know you, and I know why you did what you did. That's enough for now. When you're ready to talk about what happened, I'll listen, but I already know nothing you say will change how I feel about you."  
  
Meri's eyes watered, and she pulled away from Allura's touch. "You can't know that."  
  
"Of course I can," Allura whispered. She leaned back into the mound of pillows, pulling Meri with her. "We're at war, Meri. We all face impossible decisions--some more horrific than others. Sometimes we regret our decisions. Sometimes we wish there had been another way." She paused, weighing her words. "You think I think less of Shiro for his past? Or Keith? _Thace?_ I won't pretend that the decisions I've had to make are anything like what you've faced, but I'm not naive. I know the ugliness that exists in this universe."  
  
Meri wound tighter in Allura's arms for a moment, then slowly relaxed against her, her breathing evening out. "I guess we all do, by now."

"Unfortunately." Allura wove her fingers into Meri's hair, combing it back from her face. "But I also know that good people are still good, whatever ugliness they’ve faced, and that we can still carve out places to breathe for a moment, away from it all"

"Places like here?" Meri asked, turning so her chin rested on Allura's breastbone. A crooked smile had taken over her face, and it made Allura's heart melt.

"Places like here. Whatever ugliness is out there, I won't let it reach you while we're together. I swear it. So try to get some rest, all right?"

Meri's smile slipped. "I... I'll try. But, Allura, you need to know--sometimes, when I first wake up, I forget that I'm not back there. I don't--You don't need to worry about it. I'm dealing. I'm learning how to. But you should know, because I'm probably going to wake up in a couple hours, and there's a good chance I'll wake you up when I do."

Allura's chest tightened in sympathy, and she kissed Meri's forehead. "Thank you for telling me. Is there anything I can do to help if that happens? Or should I give you space?"

"Space," Meri said, after a moment's pause. "Just for a minute. Just until I figure out what's happening."

Smiling, Allura guided Meri's head down onto her chest. "I can do that. Now rest. I'll be here when you wake up."

"I love you, Allura."

"I love you, too. I always will."


	3. Val & Lance: Chained to a Wall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Chained to a Wall  
> Characters: Val & Lance
> 
> Original prompt happened in the Dualityverse discord, thanks to Spazzcat: "@Nonny I was looking at your prompts card and I got another awful idea for 'I will punish your friend for your failure'. Lance being hurt because of Meri or Val or Nyma." That conversation spawned three different ideas for three different prompts, this being the first.
> 
> Set during Val's time as a prisoner in Project Balmera and in the aftermath of her rescue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warnings: Torture (implied, moderately graphic especially if you're sensitive to hand trauma), mind games and emotional abuse.

Val had been here before.

After two weeks of the same old shtick, it was starting to get predictable. The guards came--sometimes in response to Val crying out in her sleep because of one nightmare or another, sometimes for no reason at all. They kicked the door open with so much force Val thought her heart might actually stop. Two of them grabbed her while the other warned off Luis and Yir with one of their taser wands. Some days she fought, some days she marched along in terrified silence, praying that if she cooperated today would be one of the good days. They took her down corridors she'd long since memorized, to the interrogation room that doubled as a torture chamber.

Something was different this time.

It was the fact that Vanda, for once, wasn't waiting for her, either with a scowl that demanded submission or a smile that promised pain. It was the way the table and chairs had been removed--not just pushed aside, the way they were when Vanda wanted to play.

It was the way the guards wrestled her to the right wall, where a pair of hinged silver bands hung on a nondescript silver peg. The bands fit snug around her wrists, just a touch of pressure against the bones that made sharp angles beneath her skin. As the catches clicked shut, an inset ring glowed softly purple, pulsing like the breath of a slumbering dragon.

Only when they pulled her arms behind her back did the dread start to creep in. The cuffs locked together where they touched, and Val fought only weakly. She'd been through this routine before, and while it sucked not to have use of her hands to at least catch herself when Vanda knocked her to the ground, it was nothing she couldn't deal with.

Or so she thought.

They turned her around, and one of the guards pressed something on the wall behind her. She couldn't see what it did, but she felt a tug on the cuffs, and her stomach curdled as the guards stepped away.

Val inched away from the wall, suspicion coiling tight around her heart, and was unsurprised when she felt resistance pulling at her wrists. It was generous, by Galra standards. If she stayed where the guards had left her, she couldn't even feel the tether locking her to the wall. Only when she stepped away did it start to pull on her wrists, wrenching them up and back. Five or six steps from the wall, and the tension finally forced her to double over, her shoulders aching.

She stopped as soon as she found that limit and retreated to stand once more by the wall. Queasy anticipation fluttered through her stomach as she waited for the interrogation to arrive. This was meant to make her more compliant, she supposed. One backhanded blow from Vanda, and she'd have her full weight yanking at her joints.

Maybe she could bluff her way out of this. She'd managed to keep Vanda hooked on her stories about an Altean cache beneath the New Mexico desert this long; all she had to do was make up something that sounded like progress.

(After that, of course, she would need to step up her plans for escape. She couldn't hold off Vanda's rage forever.)

After a torturous five minutes, the far door finally opened, and Val breathed a minute sigh of relief, already dredging up a quip to greet Vanda. Her body might be mottled with bruises, but Vanda hadn't yet broken her pride.

"About time," she began, but her words ran dry as she turned toward the door. All thoughts of putting on a bored expression fled her mind as Lance walked into the interrogation room.

His skin was pallid, his cheekbones sticking out from a face that was sunken from weeks of starvation and abuse. He wore the same skintight purple prison uniform as Val, though his loose over-shirt was more frayed than Val's. His hands were cuffed together in front of him, his eyes fixed on the floor.

A dark bruise underscored his right eye, which was swollen nearly shut.

"Lance."

The name rushed out of her on a breath, but it made it to Lance, who slowed, trembling. His hands clenched, and his eyes darted up, though he only held her gaze for an instant before returning his attention to the floor.

Val stumbled toward him, forgetting her restraints until her shoulders screamed a protest. Her knees shook, and she nearly collapsed, tears pressing at her eyes as she drank in the sight of him there, alive.

He was actually alive.

"Lance," she said again, louder now. The guards were watching her from the corners of the room, but she didn't care. Once she started talking, the words came tumbling out of her. She would have told Vanda anything she wanted to hear so long as it meant she would get to hold Lance when it was over, even if only for a moment. "Oh my god, Lance. You're alive. You're-- Are you okay? I've been looking for you. I thought-- Iverson tried to tell us you'd died. What happened?"

"Enough questions," Vanda snapped, striding past Lance and his guards. Lance shied away from her, his hands coming up to guard his head like he expected a beating.

Val's heart sank.

She retreated toward the wall so she could face Vanda with her head held high. "What did you do to him?" she hissed.

Vanda's lips twitched. "Nothing compared to what I'll do if you don't tell me everything you know about the Altean cache."

"I already told you I'd take you there," Val said, trying to sound more confident than she felt. "Take us back down. I'll lead you to the cave where I found it--we were close last time!"

Vanda snapped her fingers, and one of the guards flanking Lance turned, not missing a beat as he drove his fist into Lance's gut. Val let out a wordless cry, starting forward before the chain jerked her to a stop. Lance crumpled, his knees hitting the floor with a thump. He curled in on himself, but what she could see of his face was scrunched up. He seemed not to want to give them the satisfaction of vocalizing his pain.

"Let's start again," Vanda said, her gaze steady on Val. "Tell me about the cache. Where you saw it. What you saw. I want to hear every last detail, here and now. No more leading me around in circles. No more promises that never materialize."

Horror flooded Val's veins. "I... I already told you. It was writings. I couldn't read any of it."

Vanda snapped her fingers again, and the same guard grabbed Lance by the hair, holding his head in place as he brought his knee up. This time, Lance couldn't stop the whimper that escaped him as his nose broke. The guard dropped him, and he clutched at his face, blood welling between his fingers and dripping to the ground beneath him.

"I've come to realize that you don't care much for the motivation I've tried to give you," Vanda said, crossing her arms. She leaned back against the wall, bored with the whole show. "I figured it was time to stop playing around. We both know what you really want."

Val strained against her cuffs, biting her lip as her struggles only put more pressure on her shoulders. She stopped after a moment, fighting to catch her breath. "You'll send him home if I tell you what I know?"

"Depends on how badly you want it, I suppose." Vanda lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "But that's definitely on the table."

"Just tell her, Val." Lance's voice was thin and high, muffled by his hands and shaking as the guards shifted closer. Lance shied away from them and shot Val a pleading look. "What's so important that you can't just tell her?"

Val bit down on her lip so hard she tasted blood, but she couldn't break eye contact with Lance. She wished she could tell him--tell him that she didn't _have_ anything to give up to Vanda. Nothing but a bundle of flimsy lies strung together with legends she'd heard from Yir and guesses based on what Vanda herself had let slip. If she'd had anything--anything at all--she already would have spilled it out in trade for her cousin's release.

She let the silence stretch on too long, and at another snap from Vanda, the other guard stepped forward, producing a stun wand with a flick of his wrist. Lance's eyes widened, and he scrambled back, but there was no escaping the guards in a room this size.

Lance screamed as the wand connected with his ribs, the sound escaping through clenched teeth.

"Okay!" Val cried, wrenching her shoulder again as she fought to reach Lance, to take on the pain in his place. "Okay. I'll tell you everything, just--please! Stop!"

Vanda held up her hand, and the guard retreated. Lance dropped to the ground in a quivering heap, his breath coming in uneven gasps that tore at Val's heart.

"Talk," Vanda said.

So Val talked. She hardly knew what it was she was saying--anything, everything she could think of. Diagrams painted on the walls of the cave, labeled in alien letters. Glowing runes on the floor. Crystals and strange-looking stones and a design carved into the back of the cavern that might have been a door, she guessed. She'd thought it was just a weird cave painting until Vanda started asking all the questions Val hadn't ever considered before.

The important thing was that she didn't stop talking, because each time she did, Vanda would snap again, and one of the guards would move in to inflict more pain on Lance. A boot to the ribs, a stun wand to the spine. His hand splayed out on the floor so the guard could grab his fingers one by one and twist until they snapped.

Lance screamed himself hoarse, and Val kept talking, tripping over her words, tasting tears on her tongue and sobbing so hard Vanda couldn't have possibly understood a word she was saying.

She didn't know how long it lasted. Long enough that she could no longer feel pain in her shoulders as she strained against the tether holding her in place. She felt the tug, still, deep in her joints, and she knew the pain would hit her later, but she didn't care. Lance was right there, and he was hurting. She needed to get to him more than she needed air to breathe.

Finally, though, Vanda held up her hand. "That's enough. Take him back to his cell. We'll see how helpful she's feeling in the morning."

"Wait!" Val cried. Her feet slipped on the floor as she tried to crawl toward Vanda. "Please! Let me see him--let me--he needs me! Please. Just for a minute!"

Vanda stopped, glancing over her shoulder. The smile that twisted her face was entirely too pleased, but Val was beyond caring. She would have thrown herself on the ground and kissed Vanda's feet if that's what the woman demanded of her.

Instead, Vanda turned and crossed to Lance. She knelt before him, smile growing as Lance shied away from her. "Would you like that?" she asked him. When he didn't answer, she grabbed his chin, her claws piercing the skin and drawing fresh blood. "I said, would you like that? Would you like to see your cousin? To let her apologize for making you suffer like this?"

"I didn't--" Val choked on a sob. "I didn't want this, Lance. I didn't want any of this!"

Lance didn't look at her, though, and when Vanda repeated her question, he only shook his head.

The gesture hit Val like a knife to the chest, and she went limp, every muscle in her body giving up the fight at the same moment. "Lance..."

He glanced at her once, the pain in his eyes flashing over to anger for just a moment--anger directed at Val.

Then he let the guards haul him to his feet and lead him out of the room. Vanda remained behind for a moment, watching as Val sagged against her bonds.

She turned the lights off as she went, and Val was left alone with the darkness and the pain.

* * *

The memories came to her at night.

First in the cool dark of the _Harbinger_ , in the hazy aftermath of her rescue. She woke breathless, clinging to Nyma's arm with a grip so tight it left peach-pale furrows in her skin. Nyma startled awake with a curse, prying at Val's hand, but Val could only cling tighter.

_Lance._

The thought resounded in her mind, a hunger and a desperation without relief. She'd spent the tail end of her captivity trying to convince herself that the Lance she'd seen--the Lance she'd seen _tortured_  for three days on end--had been an illusion. Yir said the druids could do that sort of thing, and while Vanda genuinely was cruel enough to deny Val contact with her cousin out of nothing but spite, if there was nothing with which to make contact, no substance to the Lance she trotted out to coerce Val into talking...

Well, that was another good reason not to let Val get close.

Even still, she had searched. As she staged her desperate escape, as she herded the other prisoners toward freedom, she'd searched the crowd for Lance's face. If Nyma hadn't showed up when she had, Val would have damn well torn the base apart searching for her cousin.

It was just as well she'd been dragged away. They'd met with Nyma's rebel friends yesterday, so now Val knew the truth. Lance wasn't a prisoner of the Empire. He was a paladin of Voltron. A soldier in an alien's war.

Somehow, that didn't do much to alleviate Val's guilt.

"Val?" Nyma asked. "Val, hey. You were dreaming. Whatever it was, it was just a dream."

"Doesn't feel like it," Val said. Her words came in fits and starts, stalling in her lungs for long, terrifying seconds as her body sank back into the pain and the horror of watching Lance beaten and ripped apart as punishment for Val's lack of answers. As punishment for her arrogance. Who was she to think she could outwit the Galra Empire, an organization so ancient and powerful the entire universe had failed to bring it down?

Nyma shifted, cautiously settling her arm around Val's shoulders. Val sank into the embrace, trembling, choking on a sob. It wasn't real. She had to remember that. But she couldn't get the images out of her head. She couldn't make herself forget the way Lance screamed when he was in pain. The way he spit blood at her feet when she begged for his forgiveness.

She would never forget how much he'd hated her, and the only way to stop it from closing in around her chest like a vice was to find him and hear it straight from his lips.

* * *

It took a few days, but at last they made it. The Castle of Lions gleamed in the distance, bright and shining like something out of a fairy tale, and the promise of her cousin awaited her inside its walls.

She froze at the top of the ramp, trapped in the shadow of the cargo bay that had housed the other former prisoners since their escape. They streamed out, many of them breaking down at the sight of other humans, humans untouched by Vanda's sick experiments. For some of these people, this was the first glimpse of normalcy they'd seen in a year.

And there was Lance among them. He stood tall in his polished blue armor, a confidence in his stance Val hadn't seen in him before. It wasn't the bravado he was so good at putting on, the "fake it 'til you make it" attitude that had become a mantra in his life; it was the easy confidence of someone who'd faced trials and overcome them. Someone who knew exactly how capable he was and didn't feel the need to put on airs.

And Val couldn't make herself call out to him.

She'd dreamed of this moment too many times to count--whenever she wasn't dreaming of the torture, she dreamed of finding him. Of apologizing. Of hearing him say he forgave her, or that he hated her; her mind could never seem to decide which it would be.

"What are you waiting for?" Nyma asked, stepping up behind Val. Her hand ghosted across the small of Val's back, and she shivered, leaning into the touch. "I thought you couldn't wait to see him."

"I couldn't," Val said, then shook her head. "It's stupid."

Nyma snorted. "I know I haven't known you all that long, Val, but I sincerely doubt anything you do could ever be called stupid."

"I've got a list a mile long of terrible decisions to prove you wrong, you know." Val smiled at her, teary-eyed, but she stepped forward at Nyma's gentle push.

"Go," Nyma said. "He'll want to see you, too."

Once her foot hit the ramp, there was no stopping her. It was gravity pulling her down; it was momentum pushing her into a run. It was weeks of fear and desperation driving her forward relentlessly. She might have called Lance's name; she couldn't be sure. He heard her coming either way, and turned just in time for Val to crash into him, clinging. She choked on her apologies, on her garbled exclamations of relief. He was here. He was alive.

When his arms went around her, returning her embrace, the last of her nightmares melted away, and she gave into the upswell of pent-up emotion. She broke down completely then, sobbing her heart out against her cousin's chest as he held her close, stroking her too-short hair and whispering reassurances she didn't deserve to hear.

She wasn't complaining, though. Vanda had lied. Lance was here, and he was safe, and he didn't hate her.

She didn't need anything more than that.

* * *

Nyma found Val in the med bay at quarter past two. The lights were off, except for the ghostly glow of Lance's cryopod and the slow pulsing lights of the monitoring station at the center of the room.

"What are you still doing up?" Nyma asked, stopping a few feet short of Val. Even after several weeks on the castle-ship, Nyma still found herself second-guessing things. Where she was allowed to go, and when. What lines the other paladins drew that she wasn't supposed to cross. Hell, Val had introduced Nyma to her family as her girlfriend, but even still Nyma questioned whether she should have left Val her privacy tonight.

Val turned, offering a weak smile. "Couldn't sleep," she said. "I was worried about Lance."

"He'll be fine," Nyma said. "These pods are the best healing tech I've ever seen. They'll have him fixed up by morning, no problem."

"Yeah..."

Nyma hesitated, reading the conflict in Val's posture. She hugged herself, her eyes trailing back to Lance's still form. He'd been shot during the day's mission--a bad hit, but not fatal. Nyma couldn't fault Val for being shaken. She ventured forward, reaching out to trail her fingers along Val's back. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Val said. She pulled away from Nyma, but stopped in place as soon as she did so, her shoulders rising. "This is my fault."

"What?" Surprise made Nyma's voice sharp, and she cringed as Val cowered away from the outburst. Nyma breathed in, then circled around in front of Val, cupping her face in her hands. "It was an accident, Val. Why are you blaming yourself?"

Val leaned into Nyma's touch, but her eyes slid sideways, staring at the wall. "I saw the guard before he shot. I could have taken him out. But I didn't, and now--"

She broke off with a curse, and Nyma's heart gave a twinge. She'd heard from Lance about what had happened back on Earth. Val shooting Iverson for what he'd done to her. To save Shiro, more directly, but Nyma thought there had been an element of vigilante justice to it, too--something Nyma approved of wholeheartedly but which, she suspected, made Val deeply uncomfortable. At the very least, the whole thing had turned her off to violence. She carried a pistol from the _Harbinger_ 's armory when they went on missions, but Nyma had never seen her fire it, even in self-defense.

In anyone else, Nyma would have said it was the kind of pussyfooting that got people killed out there in the Galra Empire, but she couldn't bring herself to be so cynical where Val was involved.

Val had turned a lot of things on their head when she came crashing through Nyma's walls.

"Val," she said, trying her best to sound comforting, though that wasn't a tone that came easily to her. "Some things just can't be controlled. We got him out of there, and he'll be back on his feet by morning. _That's_  what matters. _That's_  what you should take credit for, not the rest of it."

But Val was shaking now, collapsing toward Nyma's chest. Her breath came in ragged gasps, fissures in her composure speaking to something that ran much deeper than one close call.

"Sorry," Val whispered. "Damn it. I'm sorry. It's late. You shouldn't have to deal with my shit."

"We deal with each other's shit all the time," Nyma said, rolling her eyes. "Isn't that part of this whole relationship thing?"

Val laughed once, the sound more teary than Nyma would have liked, but she stopped trying to pull away from Nyma and instead relaxed against her, wrapping her arms around Nyma's waist. Nyma pulled her closer, her eyes finding Lance's pod.

"This is about what happened before," she whispered. "Vanda's illusions."

Val stiffened, and Nyma lifted her hand to the short, soft hair at the nape of Val's neck. It had started to grow out since the amateur haircut Nyma had given her aboard the _Harbinger_ , but a few weeks wasn't enough to erase all the marks of what had been done to her. She remembered Val's panic during the rescue. She remembered the nightmares that followed. The late nights and panic attacks and the apologies Val choked out at every turn, as though she were to blame for what had been done to her.

The way Val's arms squeezed tighter in response confirmed Nyma's suspicion. "I can't stop thinking about it. Even knowing it wasn't him, I--I still hear his screams, Nyma. I still see the look he gave me when they were done with him. Like I was the one hurting him." She stopped, huffing out a laugh. "I don't know why I still let it get to me. I shouldn't-- Sorry."

She trailed off, and Nyma heaved a sigh. "Don't apologize. Come on." She turned, leading Val to the edge of the room, where Nyma raised one of the cots hidden beneath the floor panels. It was narrow and hard, and the two of them barely fit on it, but they found an arrangement that worked--Val flopped on top of Nyma, who let one leg trail off the edge of the cot and bent the other one so her knee was leaning against the wall.

"Lance is going to be out of that pod in a couple of hours, and he'll tell you you've got nothing to beat yourself up about. In the mean time, we're going to stay here and try to get some rest, because I don't know about you, but pacing the med bay for the next three hours sounds like the worst possible way to pass the time."

"Yeah," Val said. "You're probably right. Not sure if I can sleep right now, but you shouldn't let that stop you. No reason for both of us to pull an all-nighter."

Nyma rolled her eyes, but let Val have this. She was already relaxing, anyway, going dead-weight on top of Nyma as their breathing synced up. Nyma started talking about nothing--Beezer's latest misadventures with Pidge's robot, Rover; a bad joke Matt had told her the other day; random facts from the countless worlds she'd visited over the course of her smuggling career.

At some point, Nyma drifted off, but she was pretty sure Val was asleep first, and she was absolutely sure Val was still asleep when she woke to the sound of the med bay door opening. Coran stopped briefly at the sight of them there, intertwined on the cot along the wall. Nyma just glared at him until he moved along, and then she set about prodding Val toward wakefulness.

"It's morning," Nyma said, when Val grunted.

She didn't need to say more than that. Val stilled, then sat up, curling in on herself as her gaze drifted toward Lance's pod.

"Looks like he's about ready to come out," Coran said, putting on a good show of being wrapped up in the scans. If Nyma hadn't already gotten a read on Coran, she might have even thought he was genuinely talking to himself--at least until he looked up at Val's cautious approach. "It's a little earlier than what I told everyone last night, but I don't see any reason not to bring him out now."

He didn't have to say that ending Lance's cycle now would give them a little more privacy than they were liable to get once the rest of the team showed up. Val nodded, crossing to Lance's pod with determination that seemed disproportionate to the task set before her. Nyma hung back with Coran, giving Lance and Val a moment alone. She caught him as he came out of the pod, dazed and uncoordinated as seemed to be the norm for this kind of healing.

At first, Val just clung to him, not saying a word, and Lance looked to Nyma and Coran for an explanation. Nyma just shook her head. This was Val's burden to share--or not. And it only took a moment for her to start talking, her voice too low and muffled for Nyma to make any sense of it.

She saw the moment Lance realized what was happening, though. He stood up a little straighter, his hands gripping Val's arms. Then he pulled Val against him and buried his face in her shoulder, whispering reassurances.

Nyma turned away, feeling voyeuristic for watching the exchange. Coran angled his head toward the adjoining infirmary, and she followed him gladly.

By the time the other two joined them, both were red-eyed and sniffling, and though Val stuck close to Lance, as though afraid he would vanish if she looked away, she held her chin high and even offered Nyma a watery smile. "Breakfast?" she asked.

Nyma joined them without a word, though Coran excused himself to return to his other duties after giving Lance a quick hug and a critical once-over. Val pulled Nyma aside as Coran fussed. She went up on her toes and kissed Nyma's cheek.

"Thanks," she said.

"For what?"

"For being there," Val said. "You didn't have to talk me down like that. I know you must have been tired."

"I wasn't going to let you tear yourself apart for no reason."

Val smiled. "I know." She reached out for Nyma's hand, interlacing their fingers, and pulled her toward the door as Lance finally disentangled himself from Coran. He slipped an arm around Val's waist as she joined him, and Nyma matched their pace, glad to see Val smiling again. It was a rare thing, even now, but more beautiful for the tears that had preceded it. There would be more tears to come, of course, and when they did, Nyma would be there to tease out another smile, again and again, for as long as Val wanted her.


	4. Keith & Pidge: Big Brother Instinct

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Big Brother Instinct  
> Characters: Keith & Pidge
> 
> Requested by an anon on Tumblr. No particular spoilers in this one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: Violence and major character injury. Not much in the way of gore except for a lot of blood.

Keith didn't see the moment Pidge got stabbed. He had his back to them, watching the hallway for signs of danger--and he _was_ expecting danger, just not from inside the room where Pidge had set up their laptop to crack the fleet's security system. For just a second, he could almost believe that the rush of air the that left Pidge in that moment was a muted curse, or benign surprise, or maybe even a muffled shout of triumph.

The whimper that followed couldn't be mistaken for anything but pain.

Keith spun, his heart in his throat, and took in the scene in an instant--a Galra, one of the guards they'd taken down, was back on his feet, his sword dripping blood. Pidge's blood.

_Pidge._

His eyes lit on them for only an instant, but that instant stretched, and he couldn't drag his eyes away. They'd dropped to their knees beside the computer terminal, one hand clutching at their side. They weren't facing him directly, but he could see the way their eyes stared straight ahead, unblinking, their lips slightly parted still from that first, shocked gasp.

It wasn't until the soldier moved that Keith remembered how to breathe. The soldier's hand made it half an inch toward the collar of Pidge's armor, and then Keith was on him.

His first strike caught the man by surprise, and he roared as the tip of Keith's sword sank into his forearm and came out the other side. A flick of his wrist, and Keith had severed half the man's gauntlet--and a sizeable chunk of flesh--from his body. Blood splattered on the floor, on Keith's armor. The man pulled his arm back, cradling it against his chest, and leveled his sword at Keith with the other.

"Pidge," Keith breathed, planting himself between them and the soldier. "Are you okay? _Pidge._ "

They breathed--just that, just a whisper of air that shook with pain, or maybe in a feeble attempt to speak. It felt like someone had reached into his chest and seized his heart in a fist. Somewhere beyond the warship’s hull, Shiro and Allura's attention had just swung toward Keith, and to Pidge behind him. A breathless moment passed as realization sank in.

Then Keith was moving, hurling himself at the man who had stabbed Pidge. He was pressingly, achingly aware that time was of the essence. Pidge was hurt, and hurt bad enough that they weren't even trying to quip about it, though they'd spent the entire mission so far trading banter with Keith--up to and including during the battle with this man and the other two guards who'd been with him when he discovered the intruders sneaking through the bowels of the ship.

Keith had been _sure_ all three were dead when he'd dragged them in here to buy Pidge a few more minutes to work before someone else discovered their presence.

But the man was tougher than he looked, hardly slowed by the wound on his arm. He darted around Keith, striking when he found an opening and otherwise leading Keith in circles. He knew--he had to know--that Pidge didn’t have long, and that Keith would want to end this quickly. Keith snarled, lunging again. The soldier batted his sword aside and struck, quicker than Keith could track. He caught a flash of silver in the open wound on his arm--cybernetics. Of course.

There was a tugging in Keith's side, a friction that pulled him off balance, followed soon after by a rush of heat. He hissed, pressing a hand to the new hole in his armor just long enough to feel the welling of blood that confirmed that, yes, he was hurt.

It wasn't as bad as Pidge's wound, though. He knew that without looking, and that was all that really mattered.

He pivoted, his rage whiting out the pain, and chased after the soldier. The man dodged again, and struck, but Keith slapped his blade aside and swung, and when that didn't end it he lunged again, and again, never letting up, never giving his opponent room to breathe. Keith took nearly as many hits as he doled out, but his armor held up and his adrenaline carried him through the pain.

And then, at last, he saw his opening, and he swung, throwing all his weight behind his blade. The man’s head hit the floor, his body following an instant later.

Keith didn't linger over the kill. He spun, foot slipping in the blood that slicked the floor, and sprinted back to Pidge. They'd slumped against the console, curling around their wound, their breath coming shallow and quick.

"Keith...?"

"I'm here," he said. He was breathless, but not from the fight. Pidge was deathly pale in the weak light of the ship, their eyes squeezed shut. Keith hesitated for an instant as he knelt at their side, afraid to hurt them worse with a careless touch. Then their eyes cracked open, and they saw him there, and Keith didn't need to close the distance because they were falling against him, shivering like they'd been caught in a snow storm and hooking weak fingers into a seam in his armor.

" _Keith._ "

It was Shiro this time, his voice eerily calm but insistent in a way that suggested this wasn't the first time he'd called Keith's name. Kneeling there on the floor of an Imperial ship, Pidge shivering in his arms, nothing felt quite real, and Keith couldn't say with any certainty whether the entire team hadn't been shouting in his ear.

"Pidge is hurt," Keith said. He didn't know what else _to_ say. He heard the hitch in Matt's voice and knew it was his own tone that put it there. He was shaking almost as much as Pidge by now, his voice small and uncertain.

A sound at the door snatched Keith's attention away from whatever Shiro said next. Heart pounding, he gathered Pidge in his arms and stood, their pained whine squeezing tight around his throat. Pidge wasn't heavy; curled up like this against his chest, they weren't even all that difficult to carry--but they hardly seemed aware of what was happening, and though they hadn't given up their hold on his collar, he didn't think for one second that they'd be able to support their own weight, even just enough of it to free up one of Keith's hands.

He wasn't going to be able to fight his way out of this. He couldn't even hold his knife, not and hold onto Pidge at the same time.

"I'm coming in," Matt said, wrenching Keith's attention back to the comms. "Just hold on."

"No." Keith widened his stance as a muffled voice barked orders from the other side of the door. A fresh guard force; Keith didn't know how many. They must be waiting to swarm him.

Matt was silent for only an instant, and Keith's ears twitched with the hum of electronics around him. "What do you mean, _no?"_

"There's no time. I'm going to make a run for it. I'll need you ready to get us back to the castle." He jumped as something on the other side of the door beeped, then readied himself to run. "Someone tell Coran to have a cryopod ready."

The door opened.

Keith ran.

Voices tumbled over one another in Keith's ears, but he hardly heard them over the whistle of laser fire and the beat of his own pounding footsteps. He activated his shield with a thought, and though he couldn't angle it properly with Pidge in his arms, it at least offered them some protection. Keith curled around them, turning himself into another shield. He dodged between soldiers, tripping those he could, slamming one against the wall with his shoulder to clear a way to the open corridor beyond.

Bursts of heat nipped at his focus as he ran, little shoves and pinches where his armor absorbed a shot--or failed beneath the relentless barrage. His breath echoed in his ears, his side burned where the cybernetic soldier's sword had grazed him.

And the Red Lion called to him from somewhere up ahead, the worry in her voice giving him a new burst of speed. His legs shook, his lungs burned, and his back ached from hauling Pidge's dead weight the full length of the ship. He tripped over his own feet heading up the ramp but twisted as he fell, curling around Pidge to shield them from the fall.

They still moaned, and Keith gripped them tighter, his claws leaving gouges in their armor. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry, we're almost home, just hold on." He turned his head, looking up toward the brighter, crisper lights of the cockpit. "Hurry!"

Matt didn't need to be told twice. Red shuddered beneath Keith's back, pouring everything she had into a sprint back to the castle. Matt's worry crowded in around the edge's of Keith's mind, and when it found only a blank white panic, it redoubled. Keith clenched his teeth, listening to the wheezing sound of Pidge's breath.

His body was at its limit, muscles burning, chest quivering, and a thousand pinpricks of pain slowly swelling to something more. None of that mattered; as soon as Red touched down in her hangar, he was back on his feet, Pidge's head bouncing against his shoulder as he ran for the elevator.

Coran met him at the infirmary door, a cryopod up and open and spilling vapor onto the floor. They stripped the outer layer of Pidge's armor--their breastplate, helmet, and gauntlets. The belt was the last to fall away, clattering to the floor as Coran settled them into the pod.

Once the glass sealed shut between them, Keith's legs finally gave out. He dropped where he stood, staring at nothing, the streaks of crimson blood on Pidge's boots filling his vision. It was the same blood that coated the armor discarded on the floor around him, that painted Keith's chest, arms, and thighs. There were violet streaks, too--his blood, and that of the man he'd beheaded--but they were almost lost in the red.

Keith hadn't known Pidge's body could hold so much blood.

* * *

"Keith?"

Keith blinked as a figure in black interposed itself between Keith and the frozen blood on Pidge's thigh. His eyes refused to focus, and it was a long time before he realized that the figure was Akira, down on one knee in front of him and looking ready to stuff him into a pod of his own if he didn't respond in the next two seconds.

Words were beyond Keith at the moment, so he settled for a confused grunt as he watched Akira's fingers drum against his leg.

"Keith, you're hurt."

Surprise was enough to momentarily redirect Keith's focus to Akira's face. He must have come here straight from the battle, which meant Keith hadn't been here half as long as it had seemed. Akira even still had his helmet tucked under one arm, his sweaty hair sticking up at odd angles.

"No," Keith said.

Akira's brow furrowed. "What is it with you and the word 'no' today? You're _bleeding._ "

Akira gestured at Keith, who glanced down, surprised to find more violet on his armor than he'd noticed the last time he looked. It was dripping onto the floor beside him.

"I'm fine," he said, which was mostly true. It didn't hurt, really. A dull ache. The burn of muscles that had been pushed too hard. But Akira was still frowning at him, so Keith pushed himself upright. "I'm _fine_. Look--"

The room swayed, Keith blinked, and suddenly Akira was supporting him. His grip sparked a wave of pain across Keith's back, and he hissed, biting down on the sound as soon as he realized what he was doing.

Akira sighed. "Come on. Let's get you checked out."

He steered Keith away from Pidge's pod, toward the door to the adjoining infirmary. Keith had already dug his heels in by the time he realized where Akira was taking him, and he nearly toppled again as he pulled away from Akira. His breath stuttered in his lungs, pulling his chest taut.

"I can't," he said. "Pidge--"

Akira stilled at once, glancing back at Pidge's pod, then at Keith. He clasped Keith's shoulder. "They're okay. Okay? You got them back here, and they're going to be okay."

"But--"

Akira shifted, putting an arm around Keith's shoulders and steering him back toward the pod. "Coran?" he called over his shoulder. That was all, but Coran seemed to understand what he was asking better than Keith did because he met them by the pod, portable scanner in hand. Akira helped Keith sit, his back against the pod, as Coran ran his scans, humming vaguely at whatever he saw.

"The good news is you're not in any immediate danger." Coran straightened, keying something into the tablet he held. "I'd still advise a stay in the cryopods..." He must have seen the scowl on Keith's face, for he trailed off without even looking up from his notes. "At least let me treat the worst of it."

"Can you do it here?" Keith asked.

Coran smiled, squeezing his shoulder. "Give me just a tick to get my supplies."

* * *

Matt joined Keith around the time Coran was finishing with Keith's wounds--all of them minor in comparison to Pidge, mostly just bruising and burns. The gash in his side was the source of most of the blood, and Coran fussed again about the cryopod before settling for sealing the wound with some kind of Altean mesh.

Keith was more concerned with Matt, who had--until now--lingered on the other side of the room, his face buried in Shiro's shoulder. Even Karen had come to check on Keith sooner, clicking her tongue over his wounds and probably trying to structure a case in her head for why Keith should listen to Coran and let the cryopod do its job.

(He was too tired to explain to her why he was so adamantly against the pod; he was too tired to adequately explain it to himself. All he knew was that he needed to stay alert until Pidge was back on their feet, and he couldn't do that if he let the pod put him under.)

Truth be told, he'd started to drift as Coran worked. It wasn't sleep he hovered on the edge of, not quite, but he was _drifting_ , his pains blending into a vague discomfort that left him swaying on the spot and finally sagging against Akira, who began to rub Keith's back--which of course only made the drifting that much more difficult to resist.

Then Matt sat down, and Keith felt as though he'd taken a shot of adrenaline to the heart. He stiffened so suddenly that Akira's hand stopped its motion. Akira himself turned to frown at Keith, who steadily ignored his attention--and Matt's. Apologies tripped over themselves on the way to Keith's tongue, leaving him paralyzed and silent as Matt curled his hands around his kneecaps.

"I should have been paying more attention," Keith finally said--the most important apology, because if he'd been paying more attention, Pidge wouldn't have gotten hurt in the first place, and they wouldn't be here. But there was so much more to say, all of it clogging Keith's throat, choking him. "I wasn’t-- I should have--"

Matt put his arms around Keith's shoulders, and it took far longer than it should have for Keith to recognize the hug for what it was.

"Thank you," Matt said. "For getting them out of there. A few more minutes, and..." He took a shuddering breath, his arms clenching tighter around Keith's shoulders. "Coran said it was close. But they're going to be okay because of you."

Keith's eyes burned, and his hands came up of their own will to latch onto Matt, clutching at him as the emotion tore through him. He thought he'd heard Coran say something like that, but it hadn't processed. Not with all the blood on the ground, on _him._ Not with Pidge so pale and still in the pod.

They were going to be okay.

* * *

Pidge spent two full days in the pod. At first, Keith was determined to stay close through it all. He resisted every effort to coax him away--Shiro's logic, Akira's bargaining, Matt's sympathy. It didn't matter that Keith needed sleep, or that he was still wearing his armor--what remained of it after Coran had peeled it off to get at Keith's wounds--his blood and Pidge's flaking off as it dried. It didn't matter that the entire rest of the team cycled through the infirmary as the day wore on, and any one of them could have kept watch as well as Keith while he got some sleep.

What mattered was that Pidge couldn't take care of themself right now, and that meant Keith needed to take care of them himself.

Karen let it go on like this for about eight hours before she took Keith's face between her hands, looked him in the eye, and ordered him to take a few hours to rest.

And Keith couldn't say no to her.

It wasn't what she said, exactly, or the steel in her tone. It was the fact that Keith had seen her do exactly this a hundred times before when Pidge was being stubborn about their current project or the search for their father. It was the fact that, though she'd knelt before Keith, her glare shifted between him and Matt in equal measure.

It was the fact that she was saying this as a mother looking out for her kids--and that she counted Keith as one of them, even after he'd almost gotten Pidge killed with his carelessness.

He went without another word, sticking close to Matt until they reached their rooms, where Keith split off to shower and change out of his armor. Matt, freshly showered and dressed in a pair of worn pajamas, joined him in his room.

"Pidge is going to give us so much shit for worrying like this," Matt said with a feeble smile, after the silence had stretched too long for comfort.

Keith laughed, hugging a pillow to his chest and laying his head on Matt's shoulder. "Yeah, because they're a hypocrite. We all know how much they worry about you."

"You, too, you know. They're going to take one look at you and punt you into a cryopod to heal up."

Keith laughed, tears clustering at the corners of his eyes, and turned his face into Matt’s shirt. He would take Pidge’s anger, take their exasperation, take their lecture. He would take it all, just as long as it meant he had _them._

It was the silence that he couldn’t handle.

* * *

Keith didn't end up getting much rest over the next two days, despite making a genuine effort. It was just that every time he closed his eyes, he saw Pidge, pale and bleeding as they slumped against him. Every time the room fell silent, he heard them whispering his name. Their voice wasn't meant to sound that weak.

He and Matt spent the last six hours in the infirmary, first camped out on the beds, trying to distract each other with card games and a dramatic retelling of some movie Matt and Pidge had watched a hundred times growing up.

That only lasted so long, and eventually they moved into the pod room, Matt pacing like a caged animal while Keith remained by the pod, staring at it. At Pidge. The dry, frozen blood had mostly flaked off their armor, but their right thigh was stained a muddy red-brown that turned Keith's stomach. His ear twitched with each beep and hiss of the pod, and on three separate occasions he thought the cycle was winding down early and almost ran to get Coran before he managed to calm himself down.

Shiro and Akira arrived two and a half hours before Pidge was scheduled to emerge, apparently underestimating Keith and Matt's anxiousness. Karen made it all the way to the two-hour mark before she arrived--though considering she didn't seem at all surprised by the company, Keith suspected she'd been deliberately distracting herself with other obligations.

The rest of the team trickled in over the span of the last hour, most of them keeping to the infirmary to give some semblance of privacy.

Then, at last, the wait was over. Coran moved to the central console, Matt and Karen gathered by the pod, and Keith found himself frozen a few feet away, his heart in his throat and his stomach turning over as the last few moments ticked away.

The hiss of the pod opening cut him to the core, and he ran his fingers through his hair. Matt caught Pidge as they came out, their legs giving way. They talked in hushed voices, Matt's frantic until Pidge reached up and swatted his shoulder.

They were okay.

Keith had heard it before, of course. He'd heard it a hundred times over the last two days--from Matt, from Coran, from Shiro and Akira and almost everyone else on the team, all of them trying to assuage his guilt. He'd needed to see it for himself, though, and now that he had, he was filled with a restless, overpowering energy. He was ready to fight, itching to take on a level six gladiator, buzzing right out of his skin.

Matt shifted, and Keith locked eyes with Pidge. He wasn't sure which one of them moved first, but he was stumbling forward as they ducked past their brother.

They caught him, and if not for the tear in their undersuit and the dried blood on their armor, Keith would have thought he was the one who'd almost died. He clung to them, breathing. Just--breathing. The sharp, clean scent of the cryopod clung to them, irritating Keith's nose, but he didn't move away.

Not until they started to fidget, anyway. Then he stepped back, breathing to clear the tears gathering in his eyes.

"Good to have you back," he said, and hoped they couldn't hear the residue of fear in his voice.

* * *

"Do you have to stand so close?"

Keith was silent--had been silent for most of the mission, now that Pidge thought about it. Not that he was much of a chatterbox under most circumstances, but he'd been acting like a ghost ever since they left the Lions.

He did, at least, step back, giving them a few inches of breathing room. The space around them was dark and still, but Pidge was already hyper-aware of the dead solider lying just inside the door, and that was fucking with their concentration enough on its own. They didn't need Keith breathing down their neck.

He backed off without a word, but that did little to diffuse the tension hanging over them. Keith's claws clicked on the hilt of his bayard, his other hand tapping his knife against his thigh. The sharp sounds and irregular rhythm tugged Pidge's head once more out of their work, and they lifted their head to glare at Keith. "Calm down," they said. "For fuck's sake. You'd think we were on a timer here."

Keith's lips turned down, but he gave no other reply, and Pidge huffed as they turned their eyes back to their computer screen. It was a routine mission--bust down the door of the next prison in line, pull their records while the rest of the team got the prisoners to safety. Pidge had already shut down the sentries stationed here, and there hadn't been many live guards to begin with. They were probably all down for the count by now.

They finished their work as quickly as they could, then shut their laptop with a snap.

"Done. Let's go."

They started for the door, but Keith beat them there, sticking out a hand to halt them as he poked his head out into the hallway to check for an ambush. Pidge bristled, but there really was no getting around Keith with the way he was standing.

So they waited, and as soon as he moved out of the doorway, Pidge pushed past him. "This way."

Keith's hand clamped down on their shoulder, and they rounded on him, not waiting for him to say a word. They knew what he'd say already; he'd been acting paranoid for the last week, hovering over Pidge's shoulder worse than their mother and doing his damndest to wrap them up in metaphorical bubble wrap.

"Don't touch me," they snarled.

Keith stepped back, shock flashing across his face. In the next instant, it was gone, replaced by anger. Good. They'd rather have him pissed at them than fretting like a mother hen.

"There could be enemies," he said, his lip pulling back like he wanted to growl at them but couldn't quite commit to it. "I'm just trying to keep you safe."

"I can take care of myself just fine, you know. I don't _need_ your help."

The anger disappeared in an instant, replaced with a flash of hurt, and then a guilt Pidge barely had a chance to recognize before Keith was turning away, his claws drumming against the hilt of his sword again.

"Fine," he said. "Let's go."

Pidge opened their mouth to say something, but they weren't sure what they were _supposed_ to say. They weren't going to apologize, when _he_ was the one being unreasonable. (And it wasn't like he actually _listened_ to them, either. Sure, he let them lead the way back to the Green Lion, but he dogged their every step, and if there _had_ been danger, Pidge had no doubt Keith would have found a way to throw himself between it and Pidge.)

The ride back to the castle was filled with a prickly sort of silence, and Pidge didn't stick around after the debrief to talk it out.

It was only later that they finally put the pieces together.

* * *

It was late, the castle quiet and the hall lights turned down low. Pidge shuffled their feet, fiddling with the lid of the tupperware container in their hands. They'd bribed Hunk into making Keith's favorite cookies--traded an hour with their portable cloak prototype, _unsupervised,_ for the last minute baking session--but now they were wondering whether it had been worth it, after all.

What were they even doing here?

Their hand hovered beside the door, frozen in the process of knocking, but before they could decide to forge ahead or beat a hasty retreat, the door slid open, revealing a very unamused Keith.

Pidge tucked the tupperware behind their back and beamed at Keith, trying not to let the expression look guilty. "Hey, Keith. You still up? I was just, uh... Going to the bathroom."

He crossed his arms, arching an eyebrow in their direction. "You've been standing here for five minutes." They opened their mouth to protest. "I could hear you muttering to yourself."

Flushing, Pidge deflated. "Curse your super-hearing."

"Did you need something, or...?"

There was a hopeful note to his voice, well-concealed, but it was enough to poke through Pidge's last defenses. Pouting, they shoved the container full of cookies against Keith's chest. "These are for you."

Keith stared down at the box, blinking a few times before he took it from them. He turned it over a few times, like he was expecting a bomb instead of a snack, then finally cracked the lid. "Cookies?"

"To apologize. Sorry I was an ass to you earlier."

Keith turned without a word, and for a second Pidge thought he was about to slam the door in their face. But he just retreated to the bed, popped a cookie in his mouth and, without looking at Pidge, shrugged off their apology. "You were right. I was hovering."

"You have been for a while." Pidge grabbed their elbow with their other hand and hugged it close. "Ever since I got hurt."

A beat of silence, followed by the crunch of a cookie. "Do you want one of these? I think there's more than I can eat by my self."

It was a peace offering, and they both knew it, but Pidge wasn't in the mood to tease Keith for his lack of finesse. They just sniffled and shuffled into the room, letting the door close behind them as they joined Keith on the bed and accepted one of the cookies. They weren't Pidge's favorite--too crunchy, when they'd always preferred soft and chewy--but it gave them something to focus on other than the guilt churning in their stomach.

"It's not that I don't think you can take care of yourself," Keith said, stumbling over his own words.

"I know that." Pidge sighed, leaning their head back against the wall. "You just worry about me. Matt does, too." They let their head loll to the side to give Keith a pointed look. "There's a reason I don't let Shiro and Allura pair me up with him, you know. He does this all the time."

"He's your brother," Keith said.

The simple statement brought a smile to Pidge's lips, not least of all because Keith didn't seem to mean anything more than what he'd said. Didn't matter, though; Pidge heard the subtext even if he didn't, and they smiled as they scooted closer and leaned their head on his shoulder.

"Yeah, well sometimes big brothers looking out for you is annoying, okay?" They sighed. "I'm sorry I snapped. I just got frustrated because you've been hovering all week."

"I have not been--"

"You almost stabbed a guy on the swap-moon the other day because he 'looked at me funny.'"

"He did!" Keith flung his hand out, cookie and all, and gestured in a way Pidge supposed was meant to illustrate his point. "I'm telling you, Pidge. Something wasn't right with that guy."

They rolled their eyes and flicked Keith on the ears. "And I appreciate that you want me to be safe. But you could maybe cool it a little? The entire universe isn't out to kill me."

He gave them a flat look, and they wrinkled their nose. "I said the _entire_ universe, Keith. I'm pretty sure the Balmerans aren't sending assassins after me, at the very least."

That got a laugh out of Keith, finally, and Pidge smirked to themself as they crunched on a cookie.

"Okay," Keith said, putting an arm around their shoulders. "I get it. I'll try not to be so jumpy."

"And I'll try to remember it's only been a week since I gave you your last heart attack." They pulled their knees up to their chest and snuggled up closer to Keith's side. "Fair warning, though--your grace period is just about up, so all this smothering? Not gonna be a regular thing. Got it?"

"What about this part?"

"The cookies and the cuddling?"

Keith hummed.

Pidge tipped their head to the side. "Okay. But you have to convince Hunk to make the cookies next time. I think he's extorting me."

"He is not extorting you. He's too nice."

"You only say that because he's never extorted _you._ "

"Whatever you say, Pidge." Keith shook the tupperware full of cookies in their direction. "Tell me it wasn't worth it."

They looked up at him, smiled, and grabbed another cookie out of the box. "It was _definitely_ worth it."


	5. Shay: Insomnia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Insomnia  
> Character: Shay
> 
> Set early season 2, Shay's first night on the castle-ship.

There was no song on the castle-ship.

This was not something Shay had considered when she had decided to leave her home. The Balmera song was a constant in her life, as natural as breathing, as vital as food and water. Yes, it was the song of the _Balmera_ , and there was no Balmera here, but...

She could not conceive of a world without the song.

The paladins had provided her with everything she might need, of course. A room, furnished with the most luxurious bed Shay had ever known, with a private toilet and shower, with a closet for her clothes--what few she had to her name. There were towels softer than the finest moss and a panel in the wall where she could deposit her clothes and have them returned to her, cleaned and neatly folded, in a few hours' time.

Her first thought, when Hunk showed her the suite, was that, surely, this must be the kind of luxury the Galra had always saved for themselves.

And if it all felt strange and unfamiliar, then Shay would simply have to learn to get used to it.

She lasted until evening before it all became too much. The paladins' company had sustained her for some hours--Hunk's excitement to have her along, the tears gathering behind Matt's smile as he thanked her, again, for enabling him to remain with his family, Coran's exhaustive tours and explanations to help her settle into a strange new home.

"Home."

It did not feel so yet.

The paladins were all asleep now, each in their own impossibly soft beds in their own private rooms.

It was only Shay, and a bed that provided no support, and a blanket that stifled, and the empty air where her family should have been.

She lay in bed for a time, staring at the ceiling. It was too dark in her room, the only illumination a band of light at the base of the walls. Its red glow was all wrong, and only a fraction of the light of the Balmera's crystals. Strange sounds rattled in the walls, in the ceiling, and things hummed and whined and chirped at odd intervals. Each time Shay's exhaustion had nearly got the best of her, another noise would come, and she was once more alive with the _newness_ of this place.

She sang, a lonely melody with no other voices to echo it.

At home, there were always others awake, somewhere in the tunnels. When she stayed up too late or woke in the middle of the night, there was always someone to sing to her, to calm her fears and soothe her overactive mind. The lullaby of the Balmera was always there to carry her to sleep.

Here there was nothing, and Shay could not sing herself to sleep.

At length, she gave up the effort. The lights came on as soon as her feet touched the floor, and she gave a start, heart tripping over itself as it had so often at the sound of booted feet and angry shouts, at the flare of Galra lamps approaching down dark tunnels.

" _Vex,_ " Shay whispered, dropping her head into her hands as she sat at the the edge of her bed. She forced herself to breathe, humiliation burning beneath her skin, though there was no one around to hear the panic of a silly youngling who had scared herself in the night.

She stood, ignoring the quiver in her legs as she headed for the door. This room was too dark, too soft, too quiet-- _too empty_ \--and staying here would not help her restless mind.

Of course, she did not yet know her way around the castle. She had entered only twice when the paladins first came to her Balmera, both times trailing after Hunk and paying more attention to the stories he told than the turns he took. Coran had given her a tour today, but Shay remembered little of what he'd shown her. She had no mind for these criss-crossing corridors and the elevators that whisked you up or down a dozen floors in an instant. This place was not alive, and so she could not feel the shape of its walls.

Even so, she wandered. Allura had assured her that she was free to go anywhere she liked, and though Shay did not trust that to be entirely true, she did trust the paladins enough not to punish her for merely roaming the halls.

(She _did_ trust them. It was only years of conditioning under the Galra's rule that made her feel as though she were trespassing in these hollow tunnels.)

Her wanderings did not take her far. There was a lounge near the paladins' rooms that Hunk had taken her to earlier in the day. It was smaller than the rec room the paladins preferred, but it was close, and it was quiet, and Hunk kept it well stocked with snacks in case anyone got hungry in the middle of the night.

Shay was not hungry, but her feet carried her that way regardless, and the light spilling out through the open door drew her closer. She slowed as she approached, the sense that she was intruding pressing at her once more--but the door was open, and someone was humming within, a tuneless song that blended with the whir of some machine.

Shay stepped up to the door, cautious as she poked her head inside. "Lance?"

Lance appeared not to have heard her. He was bent over the whirring machine, fabric spilling over the edge of the table into his lap. He nodded his head in time with his humming, occasionally reaching up to press a hand to the bulky device fitted over his ears.

Shay frowned, watching from the doorway. She supposed Lance had come here to be alone; it was late enough, certainly, that he likely had not expected company. Perhaps she should go.

His song pulled at her, though. It was not the Balmera song, not even close, but it pricked at something in her chest, filling her throat with sorrow and longing. She stepped forward, hands clutching at the collar of her tunic, and Lance turned his head her way.

He turned back to his work, then spun again to face her, leaping in his seat and ripping the device off his head. "Shay!" he said, breathless through a laugh. "Don't sneak up on me like that."

"Apologies," Shay murmured. "I did not intend to startle you."

"You didn't--" Lance pursed his lips, seeming to fight against the words he had been about to say. "It’s fine. Don’t worry about it."

Shay hummed. "What were you singing?"

Lance stilled, frowning at Shay like he was uncertain what she meant. "What? Was I--?" He cringed. "Did I wake you up? My bad. I didn't even realize I was singing."

"You did not wake me," Shay assured him. "And... perhaps singing is not the word. You were humming. It sounded like music...?"

"Oh! That?" Lance tapped the device that had been covering his ears. It dangled now around his neck, a faint melody trickling from within. "Pidge lets me borrow their headphones as long as they don't need 'em. They've got a whole bunch of playlists on here."

"Play...lists?"

"Uhhh...." Lance rubbed the back of his head. "Like, a bunch of different songs in a list so you don't have to always pick what you're going to listen to next."

"I see." (She was not sure she did.) "Forgive me. Did I interrupt you? You looked like you were working on something."

Lance looked back at the machine, alarmed, and leaned in to study something Shay couldn't see from the door. After a moment, he breathed out and leaned back. "Nah, no worries. I couldn't sleep, so I was just making some clothes."

"You could not sleep either?"

Lance tipped his head to the side and stared at her, his eyes suddenly sharp. Shay felt exposed beneath that gaze, and she looked around for somewhere to hide. There was nowhere, unless she left the room altogether.

Then Lance smiled, and waved her in. "Yeah. Castle gets too quiet sometimes, and my brain gets too excitable. Music helps, sometimes, but I think tonight I'm fighting a losing battle. Figured I might as well make something as long as I can't sleep. Want to join me?"

"I... do not know how to make clothes," she said, even as she crossed the room and perched on the back of the couch, pulling her legs up and hugging them to her chest.

"That's okay." Lance reached for the control panel on the wall and hit a series of buttons. The door slid closed, and a moment later music began to play from all around. Lance smiled again. "You can keep me company, and I'll introduce you to the wonderful music of Earth."

It was a strange music, still a far cry from the Balmera song, but it made the castle feel a little less empty--especially with Lance there to talk and laugh with her. He spoke of his family, of the ocean--an expanse of water larger than Shay could conceive of--and water that fell from the sky, and when the music changed, he showed her a dance he had learned from his family.

And when, upon finishing the shirt he had been sewing, Lance declared that the next thing he would make was a new dress for Shay, she was entirely too flustered to refuse.

"I know it's lonely out here," he said, his eyes on the beginnings of Shay's dress and the music faded down to a soft, slow tune. Shay had curled up on the couch now, Lance's music and his voice lulling her almost as well as the Balmera song. "We all get homesick sometimes. But we're family--you, too, now. Come find me if you get lonely. I've got plenty more music for you to listen to."

Shay's eyes welled with tears, and she hummed a grateful tune as Lance got back to work and the music changed again. Here in the warmth and the light, with Lance's presence nearby and his music to fill the empty air, home did not feel quite so far away.


	6. Shiro: Can Only Move the Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Can Only Move the Eyes  
> Character: Shiro

It happened in an instant.

A dark forest, alive with the calls of alien creatures. The paladins were stretched thin, as always--too many Coalition worlds in need of aid, too many distress calls, too many personal crusades squeezed into every available moment. Shiro and Allura could have called in some of the others to help out on Xenides, but it had seemed like a straightforward mission: a Galra monstrosity, possibly cybernetic, unleashed on a populace unequipped to take it out.

They'd come in the Black Lion, but the creature had taken shelter in the forest--the same forest that provided the Xenidese with food and medicines.

So they'd proceeded on foot, spreading out to flank the creature. It was fast, and it was quiet, but in the darkness nothing could mask the Quintessence-glow of its cybernetic enhancements. Allura had confronted it head-on while Shiro circled around behind.

They'd been careless, though, in taking the reports of a single creature at face value. The denizens of the forest had assumed it was only one, but it only ever attacked at night, and no one had gotten a good look at it.

It wasn't alone.

Shiro had all his focus on the creature Allura was battling, watching and waiting for his moment to strike. He didn't see the smaller shadow swinging down from the canopy until it was too late. Something thin and needle-like pierced his neck, and the next thing he knew he was floating. The forest had shifted around him, ghostly lights dancing on the undersides of the leaves. Something moved in the foliage around him.

Something soft and cool brushed against his cheek, and he tried to turn his head away, but his body didn't want to respond. He could feel it, distantly: the way one leg had folded beneath him, the knot beneath his hip where a rock or tree root protruded from the ground.

But he couldn't move. Couldn't speak. If he focused, he could still blink, could still look around, though it was difficult to make his eyes focus in the darkness. Difficult to make himself remember why that might matter.

Something stood over him. A shadow, indistinct. Twin pinpricks of yellow-green flashed in the light of his armor. The thing's breath puffed against his cheek.

Shiro tried to throw it off him. He threw every ounce of will he had into ripping himself away, but all he succeeded in doing was fueling the panic now setting into his bones. He was alone in the dark with a predator, and all he could do was watch.

A crash elsewhere in the forest drew the creature's attention away from him, and he tried to follow the noise to its source, but his eyes didn't drift that far. Allura. It had to be Allura. He called out for her, reaching for the bond when his voice failed him, and maybe it was just his imagination, but he thought he heard a lull in the battle.

A pincer closed around his shoulder, the tip sinking into the flesh. It _burned._  He could hardly feel his body, but he felt the flame where the creature's claw pierced him. He couldn't scream, couldn't twist to relieve the pressure as the thing began to drag him. His eyes watered with the pain though, and he blinked furiously to keep his vision clear. If he couldn't defend himself, he wanted to at least see what was coming for him.

The creature wasn't large, and it wasn't particularly strong. It dragged him across the forest floor in spurts, heaving him a foot or so with each tug before it had to stop, scrabble across the leaf carpet, and heave again. Each tug ripped at his shoulder, and his eyes burned, and his lungs struggled to draw in enough oxygen. Had the poison reached his diaphragm, too, or was that just the panic closing in around the edges of his vision?

The lights--lights of battle--lights of Allura's armor and the lightning-bright staff she wielded--still danced on the underside of the canopy, but they faded a little more with every step the creature took in dragging him away from the clearing.

He was going to die.

The thought came to him in a haze, drifting lazily through the fog of panic and of poison. He wanted to laugh, but all he managed was a stutter in his already feeble breathing. He was going to die, and the only question was whether the poison would do him in before the creature did.

Oxygen deprivation, or getting eaten alive. As morbid as it sounded, he hoped the poison killed him quickly. He hoped it at least rendered him unconscious before he had to bear witness to the rest. He was familiar enough with his viscera already from his time in the Arena.

A scream echoed through the forest, loud enough and shrill enough to clear the fog from Shiro's head for a moment.

There was no other word for the sound but a scream. It was raw and pained, and though there were no words to it, it sounded like the cry of an intelligent being. The creature dragging Shiro stopped, shifted. Looked for the source of the cry, Shiro thought. He wished he could do the same, but he still couldn't manage anything more than chasing the shadows across the leaves with unfocused eyes.

Silence descended swiftly on the forest; even the insects had gone quiet. Perhaps they'd fled from the fighting. Or from the creatures.

Without warning, the creature atop him retreated. The pincer burned again as it withdrew, and Shiro's vision went dark as he tried in vain to scream. He breathed, and he closed his eyes, and he tried to get his heart rate under control.

A twig snapped.

Shiro's heart skipped a beat.

"Shiro? Shiro, where are you?"

Allura's footsteps were light as a hunter's, but quick and close. Shiro strained to reach his body, strained to open his mouth and speak, to warn her away. He was already dead, but she could escape. She _had_ to escape. The others would need her to lead them.

All the managed was a whimper, and a deeper, more instinctual part of him shattered with relief when she entered his field of view. A goddess lit in neon blue she was, and his bravado left him at the sight of her. She was putting herself in danger by coming after him, but in that moment, flat on his back with a hole torn through his shoulder and an unknown poison slowly strangling him, he didn't care. He didn't want to die.

Allura knelt beside him with a curse, her hand going at once to his neck to check for a pulse. Something flashed in the canopy above her, and Shiro's heart began once more to pound. Allura withdrew her hand, and Shiro caught her eye, trying to communicate the threat to her, cursing himself for his selfishness. If she was caught, too-- If he let that thing use him as bait--

It dropped, the sound of claws on leaves nothing unique in the ambient noise of the forest around them, but Allura caught it--the blessing of Altean hearing, or perhaps she'd actually understood Shiro's silent warning. She threw herself to the side, and the creature landed atop Shiro, forcing the air from his lungs. His head spun, his body uncertain how to deal with the sudden shock. White spots danced across his vision, and the sounds of struggle, of chittering calls and rustling leaves and Allura's fervent curses, drifted past him.

When silence returned, he still felt like someone had clamped a vice around his chest. Something touched his arm, touched his shoulder. The pain flared again, weaker this time. Or maybe he was too far gone to feel it. The world gave a lurch, and Shiro felt as though he'd been thrown onto a merry-go-round that was already moving, a ship on a stormy sea. He couldn't tell what was motion and what only vertigo, but the darkness came for him soon enough, and then neither the motion nor the pain could touch him anyway.

* * *

Shiro woke sometime later to darkness and quiet, every inch of him alive with the awareness of danger before he could even process the fact that he had, in fact woken up.

His first instinct was to move, to lash out, to find a weapon and get to cover and to never, _never_  let himself be vulnerable for a single second longer than he could help. He threw himself to the side, toward the sound of open air that promised an escape and not the wall of a cave or the claws of a monster.

What he manged, in the end, was a twitch of his eye.

The poison.

It all came rushing back to him. The fight. The second creature. Falling. Being dragged.

Allura.

Shiro's next breath wavered, sounding loud to his own ears, and he stifled himself before he could give more away. He needed to take stock of the situation, needed to know what advantages he had, if any. Was he alone, or was the creature here? Was he in a cave, or out in the open? Did he still have his armor? His helmet?

No.

He couldn't move to check his attire, and he could hardly feel anything from his extremities, but his armor put pressure on different points than took his weight when he was dressed in ordinary clothes. He felt like he was floating, but he thought he would have been on a different angle if he'd been laying on his jet pack and a bulky helmet.

He wasn't outdoors, either, or at least there was no wind and no fauna crying into the night. There was just... a hum.

That might have been the ringing in his ears.

Something shifted, impossibly close. Shiro's breath stalled, fear tearing through him like an avalanche. He hadn't even noticed the creature before; it had been perfectly silent, perfectly still, and he still couldn't make out more than the faintest blue hue in the air around him.

The figure sighed, and it was like Shiro had suddenly been turned inside out. That wasn't the cry of a monster, and this wasn't its lair.

He lay on a bed, a blanket drawn up over his chest. He couldn't tell what sort of clothes he wore, but they were cool and lightweight, and that suggested Altean make. The hum wasn't in his ears but in the walls around him--the hum of Quintessence, of circulating air and ambient electronics keeping the Castle of Lions in the sky.

He was in his own room back on the castle, the lights turned down to their lowest setting--just a strip of illumination around the baseboards so he didn't run into a wall if he had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

He still couldn't move anything except his eyes.

He looked toward the figure keeping watch--he was evenly split on whether it was Akira, Matt, Allura, or Keith.

No--not evenly split. He wouldn't put it past any of them to keep watch over him, but Matt would have held his hand, at least, even if Shiro's condition made him wary of sharing the bed, and Keith would never have been able to sit this still for this long. He didn't think they were asleep, at least.

That left Akira or Allura, and Shiro couldn't see enough of them in this lighting to know for sure.

He drew in a deep breath and pushed it out in--not quite a sigh. He wasn't capable of that much. Honestly, the breath he'd taken wasn't even that deep. But it was enough to catch the attention of his guardian.

"Takashi? You finally decide to rejoin the living?"

_Akira._

The rest of the air left Shiro's lungs in a rush, and he only realized he'd teared up when the moisture slid down his cheek, leaving a cold track in its wake. The sudden release of tension puddled in his veins, resounding in limbs that wouldn't move to expel it. He wanted to get up and pace, wanted to run down to the training room for a spar. Wanted to at _least_ sit up and reassure Akira that he was all right.

But he couldn't.

And that terrified himself more than thinking he'd been taken by a Galra monstrosity and stored somewhere until it got hungry.

"Takashi. Takashi, breathe with me. You're okay. You're safe."

Akira moved closer, his shape resolving as it moved across the faint blue backdrop of Altean lighting. Shiro thought Akira had laid a hand on his arm, but all he felt was a vague warmth, like swimming in the ocean and passing through a warmer current. He _could_  feel, though. Not well, and not specifically, but the fact that he hadn't lost all sensation felt like a minor victory--and Shiro needed all the optimism he could dredge out of the mud at this point.

It took him a while to realize that Akira wasn't just touching his arm, but rubbing from shoulder to elbow and back in a steady rhythm, which matched his breathing pattern.

" _Breathe,_ " Akira urged.

So Shiro did. It was a battle, far more of one than it should have been. He was fighting his panic, but his panic had a way of slipping behind his defenses to attack from a new angle. He kept tricking himself into thinking his lungs were failing, or his diaphragm was as unresponsive as the rest of him. It was--had to have been--purely psychological, but time and again he found himself unable to make himself draw in breath.

But Akira persevered, shifting so he was sitting on the edge of Shiro's mattress and talking him through each breath, until at last the wave crested and each breath didn't feel so much like a battle.

"Coran said you'd still be feeling the effects of the poison," Akira said. "Poison-ish. We're thinking it's something Haggar cooked up, or maybe something she found on a world that hadn't made contact before Altea fell. The poison isn't in any of the castle's databases, for sure, and the cryopods couldn't touch it. We're not sure if it _is_ a poison in the traditional sense to begin with. Allura thinks whatever happened might be interfering with motor function through Quintessence instead of, like... a neurotoxin, or whatever."

Akira trailed off, and Shiro ached to ask him for more details. What had happened after Allura found him in the jungle? Had she been hurt? How long had Shiro been out, and why wasn't he dead? Had he only been imagining the poison affecting his breathing? He must have. But then, why did he still feel like he was stuck in the tail end of a bad bout of bronchitis?

He breathed, and managed a quizzical sort of hum.

It wasn't much, but he would take it.

"Sorry. That came out more ominous than I meant it to." Shiro couldn't see Akira's face in this lighting, but he felt the weight of his attention. "You almost died, Takashi. You were already having trouble breathing when Allura brought you back, and nothing we tried did anything. There was never anything wrong with your lungs, or your nervous system, or anything--still isn't, as far as we can tell. But you... You just  _weren't_   _breathing._  Honestly, I thought there was some kind of brain damage the scans were missing. Coran didn't know _what_ to think. So. We put you in stasis. Went to Olkarion for help, spent two weeks trying to figure out what had happened and how to reverse it.

"Sorry about the rude awakening, by the way. I convinced them to let you come out of it in here instead of the infirmary. Thought the sterile atmosphere might bring back some bad memories."

He wasn't wrong, though there probably wasn't a way for him to have woken up after the attack that _wasn't_  going to trigger a panic attack.

Akira kept talking, walking Shiro through the prognosis--generally optimistic, though no one could say how long it would take for the Olkari Quintessence therapy to clear the effects of the pseudo-poison, or how long after he regained motor function it would be before he was back in the field.

It was all important things to know, and a few hours from now Shiro would probably be begging for Akira to repeat himself, but at the moment all he wanted to know was what had happened to Allura, and to the creatures. She was alive; he'd gathered that much. But "alive" was a very broad category. Shiro was alive, and after less than ten minutes of consciousness he was already ready to scream out of pure frustration.

Shiro had never been the type for lazy days or hitting the snooze button, and after a year and change at war, he was less inclined toward the sedentary life than ever. 

Passivity meant death. That was one of the undeniable truths of the Arena, and it had never left him alone.

Now he'd had passivity forced on him, and he already knew he was going to hate every second of it.

* * *

It took the better part of the first day for Shiro piece things together. Allura had, in fact, defeated the creature that had attacked Shiro. She'd been grazed by the thing's stinger, but between the lower dose of venom and her Altean fortitude, she'd made it out with nothing more than an arm that had been asleep for some length of time. He couldn't tell if it was completely healed, but it didn't seem to bother her now, and by her own admission, the improvement in her condition was part of what gave them hope for Shiro.

The castle-ship was stationed on Olkarion for the time being. Ryner and some of her friends were in and out to check on Shiro's status and give him doses of a local supplement that fortified Quintessence and, they hoped, would help him fight off the venom.

That was all they had for him, really--hope. No one had ever seen a case like his, or a venom like the one that had done this to him. They were doing what they could, and it had stabilized his condition. Stabilized him enough that they were comfortable leaving him in his own room with only an unobtrusive medical monitor affixed to the wall above his head.

He memorized the pattern of flashing lights as people filed through his room, offering comfort that fell far short of their aim. His one saving grace was that Coran had appointed himself door guard and kept a tight lid on the number and frequency of visitors. Lance, Hunk, and Pidge all cycled through and were quickly shown out. Allura and Shay stayed longer, attempting a Quintessence healing session in hopes of seeing some improvement in Shiro's condition, but to no avail.

Keith lurked in the corner with Akira through all of it, until Lance enticed him away with a promise of distraction, and Matt hesitated only long enough to ensure Shiro wouldn't object before inserting himself behind Shiro so Shiro could lean back against him and still be sitting upright.

It was an improvement over being stuck flat on his back, staring up the ceiling as people moved all around him. He was still just as vulnerable like this, but it didn't feel like it. Once the commotion died down, once it was just the two of them and Akira at the foot of the bed, Matt started humming, the vibrations of it filling Shiro up, the steady rhythm of his hands, running up and down Shiro's arms, lulling him into a semi-conscious daze.

* * *

It didn't take long for Shiro's recovery to become agonizingly dull. He made small steps over the first few days. A twitch of his finger, a minute shake of the head. Each time he managed something new, he got a rush of elation that was enough to stave off the maddening sense of helplessness for a few hours as he obsessively repeated his success, pushing for just a little more motion, a little more control.

Mostly, though, it was monotony, interspersed with bouts of paranoia. He slept at odd intervals, drifting in and out of consciousness whenever someone wasn't around to occupy his attention. He slept more in that first week than he had in the previous three, but rather than leaving him feeling refreshed, the extra sleep only left him muddle-headed and lethargic.

Akira was quick to pick up on this, and coordinated with the others across a series of quick, hushed conversations that Shiro only half-heard. The end result was an almost endless array of entertainment options. Lance and Pidge pooled their music libraries, Hunk rigged a holoscreen on the ceiling so Shiro could watch anything from the castle's growing library of movies and TV shows. Val got with her brother and came back with almost two hundred hours of backlogs on three different history podcasts--not Shiro's usual subject, but they kept his mind more occupied than the music and were easier to binge than most of the TV options.

Even with all their effort, there was only so much they could do. As the week closed out, he was still limited to gesturing with his fingers and small hand movements, along with limited facial expressions and nodding. His voice had started to return, but slowly--he couldn't speak at anything above a whisper, and even what he did managed came out slurred and lisping.

The real breakthrough came midway through the second week. Shiro was alone, for once, drifting in and out of the fitful sleep that had become the new norm. He woke often because he was too hot, or too cold, or because the position he'd fallen asleep in was no longer comfortable. He'd made more progress over the last few days; he could move his hand far enough to switch between podcasts, music, and TV, though he had to do it all by touch, as it took too much effort to lift his head even an inch off his pillow.

The alarm blaring through the overhead speakers shot him through with adrenaline, and that-- _that_ was enough to send him shooting off his pillow.

He only made it a few inches before he was overwhelmed by vertigo and exhaustion, and he collapsed back onto his pillow, his heart still pounding in his throat. Someone had muted the PA in his room, but it still blared in the rooms on either side of his, and he could make out the familiar shapes of Allura's muffled voice ordering the paladins to their lions.

An attack. On Olkarion? How bad was it? Shiro closed his eyes, listening for voices, or for passing footsteps. Listening for the sound of attacks hitting the castle's shields. They were still grounded, so far as he knew, and it was just as likely the attack was miles away, but he listened all the same, desperate to know what was going on.

He lasted about five minutes before the helplessness became too much. He called on every ounce of energy he had in him, every inch of control he'd regained over the last two weeks, and with a monumental effort, he managed to roll onto his side.

At any other time, it would have been a triumphant moment, but right now he needed more. He needed to stand, needed to drag himself out the door and up to the bridge so he could at least see what was happening.

The vertigo was slower to hit him this time, and he was already trying to push himself farther, trying to push himself upright. Instead, he lost his balance, pitching forward onto his stomach--and right off the side of the bed.

His forehead cracked against the bedside table, and he wheezed out a curse as he landed, one arm pinned beneath him. His head was still spinning, his body pins and needles all over, and bone-deep weariness kept him from doing anything more than pressing his free hand feebly against the floor.

The silence surrounded him, the vertigo swelled, and Shiro began to drift.

It was while he was drifting that his mind caught on another. The Black Lion hovered on the edge of his awareness, and like Shiro, she perked up when she noticed him. Shiro caught a glimpse of her, dancing among the stars, her lasers burning hot and bright. Allura was within, tightly focused on the battle at hand, and even this peripheral awareness of her closed around Shiro's chest like a vice.

Shiro didn't need to put words to his state of mind; Black understood it all at a glance. She opened her mind to him, and Shiro accepted readily.

He fell into her like air into the vacuum of space--suddenly, uncontrollably, and with no chance for second thoughts. She consumed him, overwhelmed him, but she did so with great care not to harm him. It was like flying her, and yet it was nothing at all like that. They shared a mind, shared a purpose, and Shiro was able to look through her eyes, feel the beat of her inner workings beneath his skin, see the paladins as they swarmed the robeast that was trying to break through to the planet below.

He had no control here, though. He was a passenger this time, not a pilot--but she listened to him. Or perhaps it was just that the barriers between them were so low she felt his overwhelming tide of protectiveness as her own. 

Allura's breath hitched as Shiro and Black diverted to push the Green Lion out of the path of the robeast's attack. For a moment, Allura was stunned, fear and confusion clouding her mind.

In the next instant, she recognized him, and Shiro offered a silent apology as he sank deeper into the bond and poured everything he had into protecting his friends.

* * *

Shiro spent most of the next two days with Black, flying patrols around the castle, sprinting off to visit distant stars and planets, pacing her hangar on those few occasions when she resisted his pleas to get out.

It worried the others; he knew it did. He wasn't sure how they could tell when he wasn't in his own body, considering how little he could do to respond to them even when he _was_  there, but they noticed. It apparently terrified Akira the first time it happened while he was around, and Allura had had to reassure him several times over that Shiro was okay. Even when it happened again, and again, she defended Shiro to the rest of the team, insisting that it would help him keep his spirits up during his recovery.

...And then she turned right around and scolded him for running away instead of focusing on his recovery.

In his more level-headed moments, Shiro could admit that she was right. He'd been neglecting his physical therapy, choosing to spend more and more time with Black, in the sky. Two days wasn't such a long time to slack off, he told himself, and being able to _do_  something, even just patrol for a few hours, was something he sorely needed. He would give himself the mental break for another day or so, and then he'd dive back into the long slog.

He was in Black when Allura came to visit. Shiro withdrew, trying to shroud his presence so she wouldn't sense him.

He should have known better.

"Shiro," she said. "You can't keep doing this."

Guilt and shame welled up in him, mingling together with a desperate, almost primal resistance toward going back to his own body. He'd heard the spiel before. He knew his exercises were important, and that running away from this wasn't doing anything to fix the problem.

He also knew he was going to lose it if he was stuck in his own body for another hour.

Sensing his emotional state, Black roared to life, descending between Shiro and Allura like a curtain. Allura blinked, clearly taken aback by the possessive behavior. Shiro was taken aback, too, not least of all because Black had closed a connection between him and Allura that hadn't closed for months now, especially inside Black's own cockpit. He couldn't sense Allura's emotions, couldn't guess at her thoughts.

"Black, please," Allura said, her voice strained. "I just want to help."

_It's okay, Black,_ Shiro said. _I think we can both talk this out like adults._

Black made a vaguely skeptical noise, but she relented soon enough. Allura cocked her head to the side as their connection cleared. Shiro wondered what she felt when she turned her mind his way. Did she pity him?

Rather than say anything, she merely crossed to her station and placed her hands on her control pedestals. In the next instant, they both stood in the shallow sea of the Heart, facing each other across a short distance. If Shiro didn't think about it, it was almost like having full control of his body once more.

"I'm sorry," he said, before Allura could begin lecturing him. "I know the others worry when I go unresponsive."

Allura blinked, her sympathy cloying in the space between them. "That's not what I'm here to talk about. I'm worried about _you_."

"You shouldn't be." The words were pure reflex, but even recognizing that, even knowing that Allura felt the truths he wasn't speaking aloud, he couldn't make himself stop pretending to be okay. He straightened his spine, plastered on a professional smile, the kind he used to flash to reporters and fans when he did Garrison press tours and was feeling particularly shitty. "I'm fine, all things considered."

Allura willed herself closer, grabbing Shiro's wrists. "You've been through a terrible ordeal, and you're still facing the effects of it. I can't blame you for being restless, or feeling as though you need to get out and do something. I just don't want you losing yourself in the pursuit of this sort of temporary relief."

Shiro shook his head. It wasn't in his nature to complain--not before he'd left Earth and certainly not now that he'd survived the Arena and all the other horrors Haggar had inflicted upon him. He let the emotions pool in his chest, willing Allura to understand. It was more than simple frustration with the effects of the creature's poison that drove him to spend so much time in Black. It was loneliness. A longing to be heard, and not have to exhaust himself just to convey a few simple words.

Allura hesitated for some time, then lifted her head and met Shiro's eyes. "I may have an idea."

* * *

It was odd, being a passenger in someone else's body.

It was a sentiment they both shared, which was perhaps the only thing that made it comfortable enough to be a viable solution to Shiro's loneliness and frustration. He hitched a ride with her mind whenever something important happened, the Black Lion tethering them together like they were inside her cockpit. (Maybe a little less intimate, but not by much. Shiro heard and saw everything Allura did, and they sensed each other's thoughts well enough to debate strategies and weigh the sincerity of petitioners calling for Voltron's aid.)

In return, Allura joined him for the long, tedious therapy sessions, bolstering his will with her own, tracing his Quintessence to try to give the Olkari healers the information they needed to hasten his recovery. Most of all, she offered conversation and companionship that was still a chore with the others. Speaking grew easier before the rest of it, but frustration made him snappish, and only Allura was inside his head to know that his anger wasn't directed at her.

She was there when he was finally able to sit up under his own power, and if he was too tired and dizzy to carry on a conversation with Matt, and Keith, and Akira, he could at least celebrate with Allura.

She was there when he took his first step since the accident, her joy warm and bright beside his own exhaustion.

She was there with him for his first few attempts to venture beyond his bedroom door--more to keep him from overdoing it than anything, but he appreciated her presence anyway.

And she was there, back in her own body and wielding a staff to match his, when he at last returned to the training deck. Matt was spotting them--and cheering and goading them both in turn--but Shiro's attention was entirely on Allura. They'd spent so much time inside each others' heads lately that it felt strange not to be able to sense her thoughts now.

She smiled, and Shiro tested the weight of his staff in his hand. "No holding back, now," Shiro said, though they both knew that Allura would. She knew exactly how far Shiro could push himself. Hell, she probably knew better than Shiro did because, as Allura liked to point out, he had a tendency to run right over his limits and work himself into the ground.

And, true, he was slow as they started sparring. It was more like a dance. They hadn't choreographed it, but they might as well have. They knew each other inside and out, they knew how the other moved. They matched each other step for step, and even if Shiro couldn't move as quickly or strike with as much power as he was used to, it was good just to get back into familiar rhythms.

The rest would come with time.


	7. Pidge & Sam: Take Me Instead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: Take Me Instead  
> Characters: Pidge & Sam Holt
> 
> Orelia requested a Beauty and the Beast kind of deal with Pidge trading places with Sam and, well, how could I say no to that? Set vaguely late season 3-ish, but no spoilers past like... chapter 20 or so of Shadows of Stars? If there are spoilers past that point, they’re minor ones.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I know I usually like for these to be full fics with some degree of resolution, but this prompt could SO easily turn into a whole multi-chaptered AU, and I can't let myself go down that rabbit hole haha. So this is more of a snapshot of an AU. I hope you enjoy it anyway! (I know I sure do.)

Sam's first instinct, upon waking in an unfamiliar location, was to continue to feign sleep. He needed to figure out where he was and how he'd come to be here, preferably before the guards realized he was awake. Before he'd even opened his eyes, he gathered a few things: he was cold, he was vertical, and he wasn't alone.

Stasis chamber.

The realization hit him through a familiar muddled haze, the horror no less profound for being slow to penetrate. They hadn't put him in stasis since the early days. What experiments were they running now, that they needed to exercise such control? Or had his body been injured, and they'd decided to intervene? They'd poured so many resources into him by now, it was no wonder they wanted to keep him alive.

That didn't mean he wanted to know what they had in store for him next.

He processed all this in a breathless instant before his legs buckled and he began to fall. His hands snapped up on instinct to catch himself, despite his earlier impulse not to give away that he was awake. They would know already, and they weren't above letting him concuss himself if he didn't break his fall.

To his surprise, though, hands caught him before he hit the floor. Strong hands, but gentle, steadying him and not yanking him to where they wanted him to go. They didn't bruise, didn't sink in claws and rend his flesh. They held him, and then a voice spoke his name.

"Sam."

The world stopped breathing. Sam's eyes snapped open, and he stared at a smooth, polished floor--dull silver with turquoise accents that pulsed with a light akin to bioluminsescence. The room was more brightly lit than what he'd grown accustomed to, and it made his eyes water. Two pairs of shoes stood within his field of vision: a pair of worn tennis shoes, red and black with orange laces. And a pair of soft brown boots, sturdy and well-cared for.

Karen's boots.

"Sam," she said again, her voice breaking.

He didn't want to look. His wife was standing right in front of him, holding him, speaking his name, but all he could think was that this was the druids' cruelest trick yet. An illusion so elaborate he couldn't see the flaws. So he did the only thing he could think of.

He stepped out of his body.

He expected the illusion to shatter. He expected to find himself back in a lab, strapped down and monitored while the druids played with his mind. Or, that failing, he expected to not be able to leave his body at all. The druids didn't know about his ability to separate at will, so surely they couldn't have planned for it.

But the only thing that happened was that he stood outside himself as Karen staggered under the dead weight of his body, her voice rising in pitch as she called his name again and again.

And there was Matt beside her, pale and wide-eyed as he reached out to take a portion of Sam's weight. Shiro was behind him, visibly alarmed as he stepped forward. A stranger with pointed ears and blue markings under his eyes grabbed a handheld device from a compartment in the wall and hurried over.

This was real.

This was _real_.

Sam fell back into himself, clutching at Karen's arms and choking on his first breath as the emotion all hit him at once. He stared up at Karen, up into eyes as bright with tears as his own must have been.

She smiled, and it was the most beautiful sight Sam had ever seen.

"How...?" Sam hesitated. There were too many things he wanted to ask, and he had no idea where to start. How had they found him? How had they got him out? Had they found Rax and Rolo yet, or did they not know about them? How was Karen even _here_?

Karen opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She screwed her eyes shut, a few more tears slipping out as she shook her head. These weren't tears of happiness, and a glance to Matt for an explanation only turned up a broken look that stopped Sam's heart in his chest.

"Pidge found you," Shiro finally said, pressing a hand to Matt's back in a gesture that spoke of intimacy and a deep empathy. "We'd all been looking, but they spent every waking moment searching through the records for a lead. Eventually, it paid off."

Dread dripped down Sam's spine, slow to start but gathering strength. It pooled in his lungs, suffocating and cold. He looked around the room and found no one else but the stranger, who had withdrawn to a computer terminal at the far side of the room. "What happened?" he asked, breathless. He remembered flashes of recent battles, moments of lucidity amidst a haze of darkness and confusion. They'd made him fight Pidge before, and he'd nearly killed them. "Where are they?"

Shiro's eyes were full of sympathy, but he kept his voice even as Matt turned and buried his face in Shiro's chest.

"Haggar showed up at the end of the fight. You were all injured; Ryner nearly didn't make it--Pidge's copilot," he added, seeing Sam's confusion. "They'd sent out a distress call, and we were on our way, but then Haggar made Pidge an offer. Your freedom for theirs." Matt's shoulders began to shake, and Shiro's voice wavered. "They were already gone by the time we arrived."

* * *

Pidge had had a lot of headaches in their time. Shitty eyesight, too much blue light, not enough sleep--it all added up to semi-regular annoyances, but not much more than that. They'd complained about their headaches once upon a time, and how they made it impossible to continue working on their code. That was before Matt's run-ins with Quintessence and the Quintessence-triggered migraines that followed. They knew nothing they'd ever experienced was as bad as that.

 _This_ might have come close.

Their memories hit them out of order, scrambled, maybe by the pain... maybe by the fact that they'd been unconscious for an indeterminate amount of time. Drugged, they thought. Hard to say.

There were druids involved.

Oddly enough, that was the first thing they remembered. It was a _good_ first thing to remember, in the grand scheme of things. There were very few things that would be more important to remember immediately upon waking up. Maybe if Haggar herself were here.

...Pidge didn't _think_ Haggar was here.

The second thing Pidge remembered was the trade, and they remembered surrendering themself before they remembered _why_.

_You'll let them go? Ryner and Green, too?_

That was right. Ryner had been hurt. Hurt _bad_. Was that...? That wasn't why they'd given themself up, though, was it? That didn't feel right. It was part of it, but it was more... covering their bases. Tying up loose ends. Making sure they weren't screwing too many people over with this trade.

They hoped the druids had kept their end of the bargain. They had to have known that Pidge would take the risk no matter what they said, and after they'd been knocked out, they could very easily have killed Ryner and Pidge's dad--

_Dad._

Pidge gasped, eyes flying open as the memory flooded back in. Instantly, they wished they'd stayed unconscious. They recognized the trappings of a druid lab at a glance: a background haze of magenta light, too low to be comfortable for human eyes. Two brighter overhead lights directly above the table they were lying on. A tray of instruments they didn't want to look at sat to their left, a monitor showing unfamiliar readings to their right.

"Oh, god," they whispered. Pain pulsed from the base of their skull, radiating down their spine and up to lodge behind their eyes. They tried to reach up to cradle their head in their hands, only to find their movement restricted.

Someone laughed, the sound reaching them from a distance through their pain, and when they opened their eyes again to see where the laugh had come from, their vision stayed dark momentarily, only fading back into view as the splitting headache subsided.

A druid stood over them, eyes glowing behind their blank white mask. Pidge recoiled, only to find themself once again held in place, their wrists and ankles locked to the table by unforgiving metal cuffs.

"It would seem our guest is awake," the druid said, glancing over their shoulder.

Pidge followed the druid's gaze to the far side of the lab, lifting themself off the table as much as their restraints allowed them to. There was another druid there, this one dressed in more elaborate robes with crimson embroidery around the hem, cuffs, and collar. Was this person the one in charge?

Well, it wasn't Haggar. Pidge would count that as a victory.

The head druid swept toward Pidge, dismissing the other druid with a gesture. "Leave us."

"Yes, Lady Decora."

Decora. Pidge wracked their brain, trying to remember if they'd read that name anywhere before. It sounded vaguely familiar... Somewhere in the files Meri had found, maybe? It was so hard to think with the headache still throbbing at the edge of their awareness.

"Well, now, little paladin," Decora said, her voice oily smooth. It got under Pidge's skin the way only the hum of fluorescents and a handful of other sounds could, itching, curdling in their gut. They grit their teeth, trying not to let her see the effect she had. "Welcome to Vindication. I trust you slept well?"

"Oh, don't pull that bullshit with me," Pidge snapped. "We both know I'm your prisoner."

Decora cocked her head to the side. "You wish to dispense with the niceties? Very well." She snapped her fingers, and two guards appeared instantaneously. Live guards, which was curious. In Pidge's experience, Imperial soldiers couldn't stand being near the druids. Even Haggar's warship that she'd brought to the Battle for Kera had been staffed by a skeleton crew, supplemented by several hundred sentries.

These two guards didn't seem at all uncomfortable around Decora, which suggested that they'd been here for a long time, interacting closely with the druids. Pidge wondered if that made them highly ranked or low-level grunts. And either way, why no sentries?

Speculation in that vein was very quickly forgotten as the guards grabbed them by the arms. The cuffs around their ankles and wrists disengaged at the same time as they were yanked backward off the table. The room spun around them, and they dropped to the ground hard, their legs tangling rather than holding their weight. Not that the guards cared. They just kept on dragging.

A hiss of pneumatics sounded behind them, and cold air puffed against the back of their neck, soothing their headache for a brief moment before the reality of the situation caught up with them. They twisted, blood draining from their face as they caught sight of the cryopod behind them. It had a different design than the ones on the castle-ship--not the soft lines and relative privacy Pidge was used to, but rather a spindly frame around head-to-toe glass panels. It made the device look more like an observation tank than a healing chamber.

The sight of it chilled Pidge to the bone. If they were put in there, that was it. Decora could set the pod to keep them under until Zarkon had a use for them. There would be no time to observe the lab, to memorize guard patterns or steal security codes. No chance to plan an escape, much less enact one.

They twisted in the guards' hold, struggling to get their feet under them. "No!" they roared. "Let me go! Let me--"

Their feet finally found purchase, and they launched themself against the guard holding their right arm. Only now did they notice that their armor was gone, and their shoulder screamed in pain as they slammed it against the guard's breastplate. He stumbled, and Pidge managed to wrench their arm free, but the other guard was already moving, twisting their left arm behind their back and up toward the ceiling. Pidge screamed, dropping to their knees as their shoulder flared with pain.

The first guard recovered his balance and went for the weapon at his side--a simple baton, made of either metal or some kind of polymer. It was too smooth to be wood, at any rate. Pidge held their breath, waiting for a beating, but the guard halted two steps away.

Decora stepped forward in his place, grabbing Pidge's chin with sharp claws. "Don't worry. I can't put you under yet. Just remember that this is what awaits you if you don't cooperate." She straightened, turning her attention back to the guards. Her voice lost the wheedling edge it had when she talked to Pidge, instead becoming clipped and curt. "Put this one with the others, then double-check the security on the cell block. We can't take any chances with a paladin of Voltron."

The twist in her voice made the name Voltron sound like a curse, and Pidge opened their mouth to fire back that she'd need to do more than check her security to keep them contained.

At that moment, however, the guards yanked them to their feet, and the sudden motion set their head reeling again, the throb at the base of their skull as fresh as when they'd first woke up. Far from trading insults with the druid, they now struggled not to puke all over their prison uniform as they were marched out of the lab and down a sterile gray-and-purple hallway.

The air got colder as they walked, and Pidge's vision continued to swim. They weren't sure if it was a side effect of whatever drugs the druids had given them, or if the headache was an indication of a concussion or something even more serious, but it took all their effort just to stay upright. They were sure the guards wouldn't have a problem dragging them the rest of the way if they fell.

After some time, their feet left the smooth metal floor and landed instead on cut rock. They opened their eyes, staring at the ground for a long moment as they tripped over their next few steps, and then finally they lifted their head to look around them.

They weren't imagining things.

Where a moment ago they'd been in an average Imperial base--a little quiet, perhaps, but otherwise everything Pidge had come to expect from Haggar's interior designers--they now appeared to have entered a cave. Stone walls, stone floor, bare crystals hanging in mesh baskets bolted to the walls for a light source. There was even a hole in the ceiling down a side passage, through which sunlight streamed.

Well, they weren't on a ship, that was for sure.

The tunnel wound some way into the rock without any more side passages or doors to indicate that the druids actually _used_ this part of their base. It seemed to Pidge that they'd left the drill turned on and forgotten all about it, then later decided that they should just pretend they'd meant to do it like this and hope no one called them on their fuck-up.

It was creepy, though, and long before they reached wherever it was they were going, Pidge started to wonder whether the real purpose of this passage was some sort of mind game. It felt like a march toward the executioner's block, the shadows contorting into watchful figures. The ache at the back of their neck became an itch of watching eyes, and they kept looking around, fully expecting to find someone there. Watching. Following.

There was no one, though, and the guards didn't let Pidge dawdle long enough to reassure themself that the shadows really were empty.

They came at last to the cell. There was just the one: a solid metal door set directly into the tunnel wall. It reminded them of the haphazard prison cells on Shay's Balmera, back before the team had helped to clear them out. Unfortunately, they knew from experience just how sturdy those doors could be. If Pidge still had their bayard, they could have cut through the metal in no time. If Green were here... and if the tunnel were big enough to contain her... she could have ripped it right off its hinges.

Seeing as Pidge had neither of those things, however, they were going to be pretty well stuck once they were on the other side of that door. Which wasn't the end of the world. Better stuck in a prison cell with time to think and plan than stuck in a cryopod, completely at Decora's mercy.

Besides, she'd said something about other prisoners. Maybe they could provide Pidge with useful information.

There was a chance that the others were, in fact, Ryner and Pidge's dad, and while that would make their entire martyr play fucking _pointless_...

Well, Pidge wouldn't have complained about sharing a cell with either of them. Doubly so because they doubted any number of druids could have kept the three of them contained for long.

It wasn't either of them Pidge found waiting in the cell, however.

It was Rolo, and... Wait. _Rax?_

The guard gave them a shove into the room, and they were so busy gaping at their new cellmates that they weren't prepared for it in the slightest. They stumbled, and Rolo darted forward to catch them, twisting as he did so so that he ended up between Pidge and the guards, who had grabbed for their batons. The cell held its breath, Rolo's arms curling protectively around Pidge as the rest of him tensed for a fight.

Or a beating.

Then one of the guards spat in Rolo's face, and both of them turned and left without another word.

* * *

Pidge was gone.

The knowledge sat heavy in Sam's gut as the days blew past him. Karen and Matt hardly left his side--Karen never did, for more than a moment, and Matt only left for battle or to sleep. He seemed to tear himself in half each time they parted.

The selfish part of Sam was glad for their hovering. He felt hollow and not-quite-real, and he couldn't tell from one moment to the next if he'd only dreamed his escape, or if this was really happening. He held his wife close, breathed in the scent of her shampoo--not the same one he remembered from before all this, but the longer he held her, and the longer she held him, the more it smelled like _her._ Karen held him gently, though he could feel the desperation in her grasp, like she wanted to crush him to her but was afraid he would break.

He wished she wouldn't be so delicate with him.

They didn't talk much, Sam and Karen and Matt. Sam wasn't ready to talk about what had happened to him, beyond what he'd already shared in the hopes that it might help the paladins locate Pidge, Rax, and Rolo. Matt and Karen, he suspected, wanted to spare him the ugly details of what they were doing, too. More kid gloves for the man on the edge of shattering.

The truth was, any of it would have been a feeble effort at distraction. Sam knew--they all knew--that the only thing on any of their minds was Pidge. Pidge, who had given themself up to save Sam. Pidge, who even now must be undergoing the druids' experiments.

For him.

He allowed himself three days. (He _needed_ three days. He was falling apart, and it took time to regain any semblance of control.) Then, over a silent breakfast with Karen and Matt, he reached a decision.

"I'm getting them back." His voice, seldom used since his rescue, sounded hoarse, but the silence covering the table was so complete his words rang out like a bell. Karen froze, but Matt looked up, his shock softening to a bittersweet smile.

" _We'll_ get them back," he said. "Together."

* * *

"You will get yourself killed if you keep this up," Rax muttered, running his hands along Rolo's side. "You know that, do you not?"

"Eh..." Rolo's breath caught as Rax found the problem spot, awakening a sharp pain in his side where a guard's boot had caught him. Rolo didn't know if the blow had broken something, or if it was just a bruise, but Rax's touch drove the air right out of his lungs until his Quintessence started to work its magic. "You know, you're getting pretty good at this healing thing."

Rax lifted one of his hands to smack the back of Rolo's head. "That is because I have had an abundance of practice."

Rolo grinned despite Rax's sour tone, and let Rax finish his work. When he was done, they settled back against the wall, side by side. Rolo leaned against Rax's shoulder.

"I had to." Rolo's voice was soft, and he curled in on himself. "You know that, right? They're Sam's kid. I couldn't just _let_ them get taken."

"You could not stop it, either."

Rax's words stung, but Rolo couldn't deny their truth. When the druids had come for Pidge, Rolo's rational mind had stopped working, yielding to a blind protective instinct that had him throwing himself at the guards in an effort to... What? To take Pidge's place? To make the druids leave them alone? Nothing ever stopped the druids' experiments; Rolo thought he'd learned that lesson a long time ago. He and Sam and Rax--they didn't fight the guards anymore, not for themselves, and not for each other. It only ended with bruises, broken bones, or worse.

Rax's sigh said he understood, however cynical he tried to be. After everything Sam had done for him, Rolo would give anything to protect Pidge. It was the only way he could even begin to repay Sam's kind and steady presence over the last few months.

"I will help them when they return," Rax said at length. "It is not the same as preventing it, but it is all we can do. And... Maybe..."

He trailed off, but Rolo suspected he knew what Rax didn't want to say. Maybe it would end up being... not a good thing; Rolo would never call those experiments good. But maybe they could turn it into an advantage. Sam had been the best of them at using the technopathy the experiments had given them. He could reach farther, could influence more and more subtly than either Rolo or Rax.

And he'd talked often of how much Pidge took after him. How their skill with computers would surpass his some day, if it hadn't already.

If Pidge progressed far enough in the experiments to step outside their body...?

Rolo sighed, letting his head fall back against the wall. "Yeah. Let's hope it doesn't come to that, though."

Rax grunted in agreement, and when Pidge was at last returned to the cell, Rax moved faster than Rolo to catch them and shield them from the guards. (That was probably for the best. If Rolo had done the same, the guards might have assumed it was another attack, but since it was Rax--Rax, who had never lifted a finger to fight back--they only scoffed and left the cell.)

" _Pax_ ," Rax murmured. "Did they hurt you? I can help."

Rolo sat forward as Rax guided Pidge toward the back wall. They protested his ministrations, but Rax was as stubborn as they came, and eventually, they gave up, crossing their arms and slumping against Rolo, who immediately put an arm around their shoulders.

They were shaking.

"I'm sorry, kid," he said. "I'm sorry you had to go through that."

"Have they been doing this to you all this time? Is _this_ what Vindication is?" The steel in their voice caught Rolo by surprise, and he realized quite suddenly that the shaking wasn't from fear, or pain. Pidge was a compact ball of pure rage, and they seemed ready to unleash it on the next guard to step through the door.

"Yeah," Rolo said at length. He wanted to say more, to tell them the rest of it, but he had to be cautious. He had to assume the druids were listening to every word they said.

Pidge, thankfully, didn't demand more details. They just shrank down against Rolo, glaring at the far wall as Rax shifted to better reach a bruise blossoming on their wrist. "I can't wait to watch this place burn."

Rolo's lip's twitched at the same moment Rax scoffed.

"I'm gonna do it," Pidge said, as though Rax had voiced a challenge. "Give me a week. I'll have figured something out by then."

And you know? Rolo almost believed them. He suspected the druids didn't fully appreciate the trouble they'd brought upon themselves, and if Pidge _did_ come up with a plan, Rolo would have their back, a hundred percent.

For now, though, Rax continued working, and Pidge began to doze against Rolo's side. He pulled them closer, watching the door in case the guards decided to come back. When Rax was satisfied that Pidge wasn't seriously injured, he settled in on their other side, sitting close enough that Pidge almost disappeared between the two of them.

It wasn't any real protection against the druids and their plans, but even an illusion of safety made the tension drain out of Pidge's shoulders. Rolo caught Rax's eyes over Pidge's head and saw his own conviction mirrored back at him.

They were Sam's kid. Rolo and Rax would do everything in their power to get them home safe.


	8. Keith: Touch Starved

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three separate anons requested Keith with the prompt "Touch Starved" so here we are! (One also specified platonic with the other paladins, and one let me choose between isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and/or touch-starved. Well congrats, anon! All of those made it in here to some degree or another, though the sleep deprivation primarily falls on Matt.)
> 
> NOTE! This chapter contains major spoilers for the end of Shadows of Stars. I would advise not reading it unless you're caught up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Mostly non-graphic depictions of trauma, including torture and emotional abuse. Also an exploration of trauma and PTSD as experienced by a non-human entity, including not-entirely typical dissociation and flashbacks.
> 
> As with most of these prompt fills, this chapter is not entirely canon (in this case, because season 4's timeline just doesn't allow for these events or the recovery period that would follow.) That being said, I do think this chapter is particularly relevant, as it provides a considerable amount of insight into Red's backstory and current emotional state. If you've finished s3, I would strongly recommend you read this one, even if you don't read everything in the Bad Things Happen series.

Pain.

"I know you're in there."

A fire beneath his skin. Skittering lights danced across his vision, chased by dark spots. He didn't know where he was, or why everything hurt so much--the fire in his joints, yes, but it was more than that.

"You are _mine_. You always will be."

The voice pulled at something deep in his core, though he couldn't place it through the haze of pain. Someone he knew. Someone... someone he loved? Why was she hurting him?

She screamed, rage beyond words pouring out of her. The light and the heat intensified in equal measure, and for long minutes, that was Keith's world. Light and heat and fury.

He didn't understand.

* * *

"What's happening?" Pidge shoved their way through the crowd gathered at Keith's bedroom door. They'd woken to the sound of screams, and of pounding footsteps just outside their door. Half the team was already gathered around Keith, but that couldn't hide the commotion that had Matt calling for help and Allura running for the comms to get Coran down here.

Heart hammering, Pidge ducked under Lance's arm and found Keith, thrashing. He'd already kicked his blankets to the floor, and he stared sightlessly at Shiro, who was trying to calm him down.

"Nightmare?" Hunk asked in an undertone. "Is that--Is this a nightmare?"

"Hell of a nightmare if it is," Akira muttered, sitting cautiously at the foot of the bed. He placed a hand on Keith's foot, but the gesture made Keith go rigid, his ears pressing flat against his head as he yanked his foot away. A growl built in his throat.

Matt gave a start as Pidge sidled up beside him, then turned, seeming to notice the company for the first time. "Give him some space," Matt snapped. "Out!"

Allura and Shay, both of whom had stopped in the doorway, immediately responded, ushering the other paladins out of the room. Most went willingly, but Lance shrugged off Allura's hand and continued staring at Keith for a long moment before Shiro guided him and Pidge to the far side of the room. That left Akira at the foot of the bed, his hand hovering in the air like he didn't know what to do with it, and Matt, who watched as Keith drew his knees to his chest. He could almost pass for sleeping now, except that his breathing was quick and shallow, like he was having a panic attack, and his entire body was tensed for a fight.

Matt glanced Akira's way. "Red?"

"Red."

* * *

After a time, the pain receded.

It didn't stop, not completely. The fire was gone, but something deep in his core was still horribly, viscerally wrong. It was a physical pain, a sick twisting in his gut, a tightness in his chest that kept him from drawing a full breath.

_Wrong._ He'd been so wrong, and now it was far, _far_ too late to take it back.

She was gone for now, the one who had hurt him, and he was left in an empty hangar. The lighting was far too soft to be the Castle of Lions, and Keith couldn't sense the other lions anywhere nearby. Of course he couldn't. They'd all be gone into hiding by now, like Alfor had wanted. It was just him, now.

Just him and Keturah.

He sensed her, always. If he wanted, he could look through her eyes.

He didn't want to look. He was afraid of what he would find. More friends betrayed. More Alteans hunted down and slaughtered. She'd hidden so much from him. She wasn't the woman he'd chosen all those years ago.

She returned eventually, of course, but this time Keith was ready for her. He had his shield up, a shimmering red barrier that kept her at bay. Her lips twisted in a snarl at the sight, and she didn't even bother to ask him to let her in. She reached out, her hand crackling with Quintessence, and flames erupted across the surface of the shield.

They didn't hurt. They couldn't hurt as long as the shield was up. But Keith ached anyway. Keturah's attacks hit him through the bond, each attack a knife directly to his heart.

This wasn't _right._

"Stop fighting me," Keturah hissed. "You are _my_ lion. You have no right to shut me out."

Her lion? _Hers?_

Keith growled, and for a moment, the sound almost seemed like it would deter Keturah from her attack. The Red Lion was no one's property; Keturah of all people should know better than to lay claim to her like this.

Keturah stopped herself after a single step backward, her lip pulling back. She reached out a hand and closed it on empty air, then pulled, and Keith felt something inside him lurch.

"You are _mine_. Don't ever forget that I hold your very soul in the palm of my hand."

_**You do,**_ Keith said, numbness stealing across him. _**It is a gift I gave to you when I made you mine. But you are mine no longer.**_

He severed the bond before Keturah could say more. It was a simple thing, no explosion to announce what had been done, no blood to show that a hole had been ripped in both their cores. A paladin bond could be relinquished without harm, but those bonds only went dormant. An echo of the connection remained, and Keith feared Keturah could twist even an echo of the bond to her advantage.

This wasn't a release. It was more violent than that, and it hurt worse than anything Keturah could hurl in Keith's face. It hurt her, too; he could feel that, faintly, as the tatters of the bond hung in the air between them.

Keturah's expression changed. No longer disdain, no longer greed. It was raw fury now, the fury of one who thought they deserved the universe and had been denied.

She screamed, thrusting her palm forward, and it wasn't fire that sprouted from her fingertips now. It was lightning, and though it couldn't reach through Keith's shield to damage his systems, it still caught the remnants of the bond in the air and lit them up like tinder, searing him from the inside.

"I haven't finished with you," Keturah spat. But she turned, her coat snapping around her ankles as she swept from the room, and Keith was left alone with the pain and the wreckage of his own mistakes.

* * *

"Red?" Shiro asked. "What does this have to do with Red?"

Matt hesitated, prodding at the bond--cautiously. He could feel something waiting at the other end, and he felt sure it would pull him in the same way it had pulled in Keith if he let his guard down.

"We told you that Red's been having flashbacks?" Matt said, pulling his eyes away from Keith. "Ever since Zarkon attacked you at the summit in his new lion. Keith and I have both gotten caught up in the periphery of some of it."

Lance cursed, balling up the collar of his pajama shirt in his hand. "I remember that. A whole bunch hit while we were on the homeworld. They weren't this bad, though."

"Keith wasn't asleep those other times," Akira said. "And Red was miles away." He'd placed his hand on the rumpled sheets a few inches from Keith's foot, clearly wanting to sooth him but afraid any touch would have the opposite effect. He was right to be wary; Matt knew too well how touch could chafe for Keith even at the best of times. Right now, it was the last thing he needed. "I think this time it's bad from Red's end to begin with, but Keith being here, asleep..."

"Lower barriers," Matt said. "Slipped in like a dream, maybe, and took root before he had a chance to realize what was happening."

It had hit Matt hard, too, that initial burst of panic. He'd caught only a few hazy images, a garbled voice, and a flash of pain that cut straight to his core. He'd been up late talking with Shiro about Pidge--they were still struggling after Ryner's death, and it had Matt worried--but Red's sudden terror had wrenched all thoughts of Pidge and Ryner and Matt's father out of his head. It was a testament to the force behind that psychic pull, and if Shiro hadn't been there to walk Matt through a series of grounding exercises, Matt suspected he'd be in the same state as Keith: awake, maybe, but definitely unaware of his surroundings, trapped inside someone else's memories.

A commotion at the door announced Coran's arrival, and Matt stood to make room for him at the bedside. He ran a scanner down the length of Keith's body, frowning as Keith choked on another shallow breath.

"What happened?"

Akira filled him in as succinctly as he could, Matt volunteering details from his own experience to help fill in the gaps. Coran finished his scan as they talked and reviewed the results. His expression wasn't very encouraging.

"Keith?" Coran called, taking a seat on the edge of the bed. "Keith, can you hear me? I'm going to touch your hand; is that all right? If you can hear me, squeeze my hand."

Keith gave no response, no sign that he'd even heard Coran. Coran repeated his words, then reached out cautiously for Keith's hand, but the moment he made contact Keith flinched away, his breath rattling in the air.

"All right," Coran said, retracting his hand at once. "That's all right. We don't have to do that." Coran hesitated, then turned to the others, who were all watching him expectantly. "There's nothing physically wrong with him, aside from the stress of it all."

"He can't see or hear any of us," Pidge pointed out. "That seems like a pretty big problem to me."

Coran's gaze drifted back to the bed. "Indeed. I think Akira and Matt have the right of it. If his mind has gotten pulled into the Red Lion's memories..."

Matt glanced Shiro's way, his chest constricting at the stricken look on his face. "But I've had flashbacks, Coran. I've helped Shiro through them, too. It's not this bad for either of us."

"But it's not Keith's flashback, is it?" Coran sighed, then pushed on his knees as he stood. "We may have to try to help Red through this--or wait for her to come out of it on her own. I can't say I've ever tried grounding exercises with a lion."

"How long do you think that'll take?" Lance asked.

Coran shook his head. "I don't know. We'll have to keep an eye on Keith in the meantime. If it goes on too long, or if he gets more agitated, we may have to consider a cryopod. It won't do much for the... the dreams, if you will. But it will keep him from injuring himself. That may be the best we can do for him."

* * *

They tried.

For three hours, they tried everything they could think of to ground Red and coax her out of the flashback. Matt tried first, but he'd barely stepped inside the hangar before the memories brought him to his knees, and Shiro carried him back up to Keith's room, leaving him there with orders to rest.

Akira continued alone after that. As the only one with a tangible connection to Red but no risk of getting consumed by the memories, they all agreed he had the best shot of reaching her. But it was all for nothing. Red kept her shield up the entire time, and if she could hear anything Akira said, she gave no outward sign. Matt reported no change in the bond, and Keith remained unresponsive.

When he progressed from near-catatonic to clawing at his chest, digging bloody furrows in his skin, Coran made the call.

"We need to put him in a pod."

Silence greeted this declaration, and Shiro felt as though a block of ice had coalesced in his chest. He knew first-hand that the cryopods couldn't stop nightmares, and he couldn't stop from feeling a little queasy at the thought of shutting Keith up while he was hurting.

But Coran was right. None of them could calm Keith down or communicate with him, and touching him--even to keep him from mutilating his own chest--only made things worse. Until they found a way to help Red, or she resurfaced from her own memories, a pod was Keith's best option.

"How long do you think it will be?" Shiro asked. Coran had administered a sedative to make it easier to move Keith, and now they were just waiting for it to take effect. "My flashbacks have never lasted more than an hour, even if there's no one there to help me ground myself, but it's already been longer than that."

"Trauma hits everyone differently," Coran said with a helpless shrug. "I'm not an expert in these things, but I'm aware that some species are predisposed to longer flashbacks than others. I don't know about humans, but it's not uncommon among Alteans for an attack to last several days, with periods of lucidity interspersed with vivid flashbacks and periods of heightened sensitivity to triggers. I have no idea how something like this might present in the lions."

"So we just have to wait?"

Coran squeezed his shoulder. "We'll get through this," he said. "We always do."

Shiro smiled, and once the sedative had taken hold, he helped Coran move Keith onto a hovering gurney, and they took him down to the med bay to settle him into a pod.

* * *

Cold.

There was no other word for it, though it wasn't an absence of heat so much as an absence of sensation.

Thinking was hard here. But he knew. He knew what happened.

Keturah was out there somewhere. Close. He could sense her still, despite ripping out their connections. She wasn't ready to let go, so she clung to the frayed threads of the bond. She still came to the hangar where he was being held. She still poked and prodded at the open wounds where they had been connected. She thought she could compel him to let her in.

She was wrong, of course, but he was not immune to pain, and she was not averse to doling it out.

So he shut her out. Shut everything out.

He remained aware enough to monitor the damage to his systems and initiate a self-repair mode when it was warranted. He kept open a channel for his sisters to reach him, should any of them return.

But that was all. He did not let himself hear Keturah's words. He did not let himself see the _glaes_ on her cheeks bleed as the corruption in her Quintessence spread, as she delved deeper and deeper into twisted magics and them to prolong her life.

He did not let himself feel. Feeling was dangerous.

There was nothing here.

He was alone.

And slowly, time began to slip away.

* * *

Matt didn't sleep that night. It was the worry, in part. His mind was restless, constantly circling back to Red and to Keith and to the memories plaguing them both.

More than the worry, though, it was fear that kept him awake long after his body began to call for sleep. Fear that sleeping would lower his guard enough for Red's memories to sink their hooks into him. Fear that if he went to sleep, he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to be there for Keith and Red; he didn't want to join them.

(He wondered, briefly, if Red's memories took on a more tangible form in the bond, the way they did when she pulled her paladins into her Heart. If so, maybe he could find Keith in the memories. Maybe they could help each other.)

It was a crazy idea, born of a mind pushed beyond the point of exhaustion, so he put it out of mind and threw himself into busywork to try to keep his mind occupied and his body moving. He started with mechanical projects, and when his eyes lost their focus, Shiro enticed him into a walk around the castle-ship.

"You should sleep," Matt said after Shiro's third stifled yawn. "You didn't get any sleep last night, either. Don't think I've forgotten."

Shiro pursed his lips. "I'm fine."

"There's no reason for both of us to suffer, Shiro. Go get some rest. You can help keep me awake all day tomorrow if it makes you happy."

Shiro resisted a few minutes longer, but he _was_ tired, and all his yawning was only making it worse for Matt, who finally kicked him out, then continued his walk alone.

He found Nyma in the kitchens, and her raised eyebrow exuded sarcasm even before she spoke. "You're still up?"

"Don't rub it in," Matt grumbled, sitting beside her and accepting one of the chocolates from the tin she was eating out of. "Are you going to be up for a while?"

"Kinda hard to fall back asleep after that."

Matt gave a humorless laugh and chewed his chocolate piece in thoughtful silence. He swallowed, then turned to Nyma. "You want to help me stay awake, then? Cause I'm not sure that's gonna happen on my own."

She flashed a grin, almost gleeful, but it was ruined somewhat by the concern that crinkled the corners of her eyes. "Sure," she said. "Just promise you won't punch me if I have to resort to dunking your head in ice water."

* * *

Scenes played out before Keith's eyes, impossibly vivid and unnaturally fluid. A battlefield became a hangar became a silver beach on a distant planet, seamless and disjointed all at once.

Keturah.

It had to be Keturah's doing.

He wasn't aware of her any longer. Wasn't aware of much of anything. There was a film between him and the rest of the world, and all that was left to him was the echoes of a time before she'd thrown all that they could have been in his face.

His friends--his sisters, their paladins--laughed and smiled in his memories, but he could not reach them.

He was alone.

Maybe he always had been.

* * *

The other lions tried to help. Takashi mentioned it first, and Akira thought that maybe Black was just picking up on Shiro's helplessness and his longing to be able to do something. A tension hung over the castle-ship, and Akira was sure everyone could feel it, even the civilians who had no idea what was happening with Keith and Red.

It wasn't only Black who tried to help. One by one, each of the lions reached out in an attempt to soothe, to comfort, to ground. Akira felt it each time--a spike in his heart rate, a narrowing of his focus to a shadow, or a sound, or some other sign of an enemy lurking just out of sight.

He was immune to Red's memories, but as it happened, he wasn't quite so immune to her paranoia.

For the most part, he was able to muscle through it. He was stressed and panicky, but he would have been stressed and panicky no matter what. Keith had been in the cryopod for twelve hours and showed no signs of improvement. Meanwhile, Matt was exhausted, but too terrified to go to sleep.

(Akira didn't say anything, but he was right to worry. If he let down his guard, Akira knew he would be quick to join Keith.)

It didn't take long for most of the lions to realize that their attempts to get through to Red weren't helping. But when Akira ventured back down to Red's hangar to try once more to connect with her, he found the Green Lion there, curled up in the far corner of the hangar, purring. The sound had a pained, frantic quality to it, and that more than anything told Akira that Green was worried.

All the lions were, he supposed. It was just that Green, as the smallest of them besides Red, was the only one who could fit in here without crowding.

Red seemed not to have noticed her--but that might actually be considered an improvement, considering how agitated she'd gotten over Green's last attempt. Akira nodded to Green, silently wishing her luck in getting through to Red. Akira certainly wasn't having any luck.

He tried anyway; he couldn't think of anything else to do.

* * *

He drifted.

For a long time, he only drifted.

At times, he thought he saw Keturah through the darkness. She still came to him. Less often than at first, but she did come, rekindling that old ache, prickling at his mind, trying to goad him into responding.

He didn't respond.

Whenever he sensed her approach, he shrank back in fear, but he could do nothing to defend himself. He couldn't move, couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't feel. Even the pain, he thought, was only inside his head.

Maybe Keturah's visits were only inside his head, too.

He was nothing, and all around him was nothing, and he almost missed the pain, because at least the pain let him know he was real.

How long had it been?

He tried to count the days, at first, but without sight, he couldn't track the cycle of the ship's lighting. Without sound, he couldn't hear the ebb and flow of activity in the hangar around him. Without opening himself up, he couldn't check the date in the ship's computer--and if he opened himself up, he knew Keturah would twist that to her own advantage.

It had been months. Maybe years.

Maybe far longer than that. There were holes. Glossy blank patches in his consciousness full of nothingness and solitude. He hadn't slept, or maybe sleeping was all he had done.

Maybe it would be better to cut all power. Stop drifting and just... leave. Run away. Skip ahead to the part where something changed, if anything ever did. Skip ahead to the end.

He almost did it. Almost surrendered to the nothingness slowly eating away at his mind. But he knew if he did, he would never know if his sisters came for him. Or his paladin.

He dreamed of a new paladin, sometimes. Fantasized that they'd come for him. Saw them standing before him, already dressed in the armor of their station, their touch gentle and their voice soft. He wanted so badly to believe it was real.

But it was just another dream.

* * *

Matt tried to hold out. He did. He kept moving, kept finding new things to occupy his body, even after his mind gave up on focus. He stuck close to Nyma, to Shiro, to Akira, to anyone who would promise to keep him awake. But he'd already been tired when the attack started, and there wasn't anything urgent enough to force him to stay awake, besides the fear of getting pulled under--and that could only carry him so far.

In the early hours of the second morning, just over twenty-four hours after Keith had been pulled in and nearly forty since he'd last slept, with Shiro shaking him and urging him to stay awake, Matt finally gave in.

He didn't remember sleeping, only waking up. Only a few hours had passed, though he wouldn't learn that until much later. Shiro and Akira were there, tension tying them both in knots. His mother, too, and Pidge, sitting at his beside in the--

They'd moved him to the infirmary adjacent to the pod room.

It took him a long time to process that fact. The sterile white walls and the scent of antiseptic stirred something dark and cold in him, but he was too tired for it to become anything other than the same sluggish dread that had bogged down his sleep.

Groaning, he flung an arm over his eyes, ready to sleep for another twelve hours, but the motion caught someone's attention. Several someones, if the noise that followed was any indication. Matt couldn't make himself focus on the voices, or the questions they flung his way. He responded to a few--or tried to. Must have managed _something_ , because after a while they quieted, and the lights dimmed.

Matt was out before he had time to figure out why everyone was so worried about him.

* * *

It was nearly night again by the time Matt next woke, and though he was still groggy and lethargic, his mind at least made an attempt to fill in the missing pieces.

He'd slept.

That fact seemed important--more important than it would have been if he'd just been an ordinary sort of tired.

"Hey."

Matt turned his head and found Shiro sitting in a chair beside his bed. He was in the infirmary. The realization surprised Matt, before he realized that it shouldn't have. He'd already known that, hadn't he?

Matt stretched, letting out a sound that wavered between a groan and a tea kettle's whistle as every inch of him came awake and instantly regretted the experience. "Hey."

"How'd you sleep?" Shiro asked.

Matt shrugged.

"No dreams?"

Matt cracked his eyes open and frowned at Shiro. There _had_ been dreams, in fact. Fragments of them, already burning away now that Matt was awake again. Already he'd forgotten everything except for a lingering sense of dread.

No, not dread.

Shame.

"Right," Matt said, grinding the heel of one hand into a crusty eye. "Red's still..."

"Yeah." Shiro took his hand and squeezed. "We're pretty sure Keith's still having dreams, too. Or at least he's still under more stress than he should be. Akira thinks Red might be starting to come out of it, though. Enough that you didn't get caught up like Keith did."

There was a question in the words, and Matt offered a smile as he squeezed Shiro's hand in return. "Yeah. I think I was on the fringes of it, maybe? Don't remember anything, though. How long was I out?"

"About fourteen hours. You woke up once this morning. I don't know if you remember at all."

Matt hummed a negative. He felt like he should have remembered something, but even last night was a blur.

"Hungry?" Shiro asked. "We're not too late for dinner, if you don't mind getting swarmed. The team's been worried."

Matt wasn't all that hungry, truth be told. He'd rather just roll over and go back to sleep. But he let Shiro coax him out of bed, and by the time they were halfway to the dining hall, his stomach had woken up enough to start growling. Shiro hadn't been exaggerating when he said Matt was going to get swarmed, and Matt endured it all as patiently as he could before breaking away and shoveling down the plate Shiro had put together for him.

* * *

Red _was_ improving. Akira insisted on that point, and Matt was inclined to believe him. She seemed almost to recognize when Akira was in the room, and Pidge said Green was starting to reach out again--cautiously, but she'd been holding back for a day and a half, so even a slight change was noteworthy.

Still, it took almost another full day before she returned to herself entirely. It was, at first, just a lessening of the pressure in the air. Matt breathed a sigh of relief a full ten minutes before he realized that the bond had gone quiet. Red's turmoil had been so distant that it had become background noise to Matt, and its absence snuck up on him.

Two hours later, she reached out to him, tentatively, and impressed an apology on him. Matt was stunned, and tried to gather his wits enough to tell her it was all right, it wasn't her fault--but she progressed quickly from shame to worry.

_**Keith?** _

Matt didn't know what to say. Fragmented images danced at the edge of the bond, giving him an inkling of what Keith--and Red--had just been through. It made him sick to his stomach, and all he could do was reach out to offer Red what little comfort he could.

* * *

The nothingness dissolved in a flash of fire and a roar like a hundred engines revving all around him. Keith cried out, curling in on himself in an effort to get away from it all. His head spun, his stomach heaved, and then he was on the floor, familiar cold at his back and a thousand grasping hands assaulting him from every other angle. Lightning sparked where the hands touched him, crackling across his shield--his armor--his _skin._

And then there was a presence in his mind, on the edge of his awareness, clawing at the raw ends of his broken bond, and all he could think was, _Keturah._

The presence stilled, ached, withdrew. The hands disappeared, taking the lightning with them. And still it was too much. Too much light, too much noise. Too many voices asking too many questions.

He didn't know what they wanted from him.

* * *

They moved Keith to his room as soon as Akira was able to coax him into motion. Matt tried not to resent the fact that Akira was the only one who could get close to Keith without agitating him; right now, all that mattered was that _someone_  could get him up off the floor at the mouth of the cryopod.

Allura shooed most of the team away before they'd even left the pod room, and Keith slowly stopped cowering away from every whisper. That--and the fact that his ears, which never lifted far, pressed flush against his scalp any time anyone spoke or drifted closer than two feet--was the only indication that he was aware of his surroundings at all. It was too much like how he'd acted when all this started for Matt's comfort.

Shiro, Lance, and Pidge stayed long enough to see Keith settled into his own bed. (He didn't like the blankets, and Pidge ended up dumping them on the floor, glaring at them like they were the problem.) Akira stayed a little longer, combing his fingers through Keith's hair until his breathing slowed and he relaxed into sleep.

"You going to be okay?" Akira asked.

Matt nodded. "I'm just going to keep an eye on him. I can call if anything happens."

"I have my comm on me. Doesn't matter how late it is."

Matt smiled, but said nothing else as Akira withdrew. Then it was just him and Keith, and the dark, silent room. Keith was asleep, or appeared to be so, and Matt didn't want to disturb him. He didn't know all of what he'd seen when he was under, but he had a good idea of the themes.

After that, Keith needed all the rest he could get.

Lance returned a short while later with his mp3 player and a portable speaker. He offered both to Matt with a lift of his shoulder and a subdued smile, and then he was gone as quickly as he'd come. Matt found something slow and soft and turned the speaker to its lowest setting before hitting play. Keith's ear twitched once.

"In case you want to change it," Matt whispered, setting the mp3 player on the bed near Keith's hand.

He didn't respond, but neither did he seem bothered by the music, so Matt left it alone, settling into the chair by the desk and waiting in case Keith needed him.

* * *

Keith woke to low voices; fewer of them than there had been at first. He couldn't place them at first, or follow the conversation, but something about it felt familiar, and comfortable.

For a while, he just lay there, soaking in the sound. Music played in the background, even softer than the voices, but it seemed so long since Keith had heard anything at all that his ears fixated on the sound, following the lines of unfamiliar instruments as they twisted together.

Slowly, he realized the voices had stopped.

"Keith?"

A hand on his arm--gentle, not squeezing or burning or reaching, just... resting.

It was still too much, a hundred million needles prickling at his skin; sandpaper rubbing him raw; heat and cold and so much weight Keith's bones ached.

Keith wasn't sure if he made a sound, or if he pulled away, but the hand was snatched back, gone in an instant, and Keith sagged from relief, even as a corner of his mind chased the sensation, afraid that without the tether of pain, he would start to drift again.

"Sorry. You awake?"

Keith cracked his eyes open, bracing for the sharp, overwhelming light that had assaulted him when he first woke up. Instead, he found himself in his own room, the lights turned down low. Shiro and Akira sat beside the bed, watching him with furrowed brows.

Keith opened his mouth, but he couldn't find the words to sum up the tempest of emotions that hit him at the sight of them. Of anyone who wasn't Keturah, really, but of _Shiro and Akira_ , specifically. He wanted to throw himself at them, wanted to ask about the others, wanted to know what had happened...

Wanted to run away, to curl up in a corner and hide from the memories that were already pressing at his mind.

"I'm awake," he said, because his body couldn't decide what to do, and his mind couldn't conjure any other words. He sat up, just to prove to himself that he could, and almost at once his teeth began to chatter.

"Cold?" Akira asked, and hardly waited for Keith to nod before going to the foot of the bed to retrieve Keith's blankets from the floor. Keith didn't remember kicking them off in the night, but then, he didn't remember much of anything except the nothingness. Being back in this room, being back with Shiro and Akira, hearing the soft melody still playing from somewhere nearby... it all felt like he'd slipped into another lifetime, everything at once foreign and familiar.

Akira handed him the blanket, and Keith wrapped himself up in it, blinking away tears at the warmth and the way the blanket stretched tight around his shoulders. He gathered the edges in a clenched fist at the level of his heart, pulling tighter. His skin prickled where the blanket touched it, like his entire body had fallen numb and the sensation was just returning to it. It verged on pain, but after so long of nothing, he didn't want to let the feeling go.

"You don't need to talk about anything until you're ready," Shiro said, leaning forward. He had his hands folded between his knees, like he had to hold himself back from reaching out for Keith. "But if talking would help, we're here."

Kieth wasn't ready to talk. He wasn't ready for anything, but he was floating on the edge of a dream, and he needed something to make him feel grounded. "How long was I..." He didn't know how to finish the question. As it happened, he didn't know what he'd _been_  for the last eternity. Dreaming? Hallucinating? He remembered the visions with enough clarity to guess that they'd come from Red, originally, but they'd felt so _real_.

"Three days," Shiro said.

" _What?_ " Keith was so shocked the word slipped out of him on a breath, and he stared at Shiro, trying to comprehend.

"Yeah." Akira rubbed a hand along his jaw, pain pinching the corners of his eyes. "Sorry it took so long."

So _long?_  Keith almost laughed. He barely heard the rest of what Akira was saying--something about Red having a flashback and no one being able to talk her down.

Three days.

Three _days?_

It was impossible. It had to be. Keith had spent so long in that nothingness--he'd watched Keturah come and go so many times--he'd been _so alone_  for _so long_...

It couldn't possibly have been only three days.

Keith shivered again, and clutched the blanket tighter, relishing the ache in his hand and nodding along to whatever Shiro and Akira were saying.

He'd only been alone for three days.

* * *

The others rotated through as Keith drifted in and out of sleep and tried to readjust to a body that didn't seem to fit right. They came sometimes in groups, but however much Keith tried to be okay with the noise and the motion, he was too easily overwhelmed, and too many of his friends could read his distress even when he tried to hide it.

He didn't _want_  to be overwhelmed. He'd missed them as much as they'd missed him. _More_ , because they'd only had to endure three days of not knowing. He'd had to endure...

Longer.

Much longer.

Not that anyone knew that. Keith wasn't eager to revisit what he'd seen, and he certainly didn't want any more pity than he'd already earned. He just wanted things to go back to normal so he could move on and stop feeling at every moment like everything was happening too fast or like he was an inch away from falling back into the void.

In the end, it was Pidge who put an end to the endless cycle of visitors. Keith wasn't sure if they saw that he was on the verge of shouting, or crying, or pulling his blankets around him like a shield to ward off the well-wishes. Maybe they were just as tired and frustrated as he was, and had decided Keith's room was the best place to get some peace and quiet.

...Maybe Keith was stretching a little to far to justify the way they'd banished the entire rest of the team with a twitchy eyebrow and a bayard sparking a warning everyone knew they didn't really mean.

Once the others had left, Pidge settled in on the far side of the room with their laptop. They asked him (twice) if the sound of their typing bothered him, and he'd still practically had to force them to work on whatever their current project was. That was another way in which they knew just a little more than Keith was really comfortable with giving away. They'd talked about sensory issues before, of course, so Keith knew they had every reason to recognize the signs of sensory overload in him.

That didn't mean he was happy that someone--anyone, even a friend--could see when he was breaking down.

He wasn't sure how long they spent like that, Pidge working silently on their own thing, the light of their computer screen washing their face in a ghostly blue, Keith huddled under his blanket in the corner of his bed, watching them. Their typing kept up a soothing rhythm, even with the irregular starts and stops, and Keith thought he could have nodded off again, but he was tired of sleeping all the time.

"Was it really only three days?"

Pidge looked up at him, their fingers moving a few seconds longer before going silent. "What?"

Keith curled lower over his knees and shifted his gaze to the boxes of snacks Hunk had left on his beside table. "Shiro said I was... out of it... for three days."

"And, what, you think he was downplaying it to make you feel better?"

Keith shrugged. If anyone else had asked that question, it might have felt like an accusation--of _course_  Shiro wouldn't lie to him. That wasn't how Shiro was.

But Keith knew Pidge better than that. They weren't accusing him of anything; they were just trying to figure out what he was thinking. Maybe that was why it was so much easier to talk to Pidge about this. That, and the fact that they had no particular connection to Red to be upset by what Keith had seen in her memories.

"I just... It felt like longer," Keith admitted. "I don't know what Red was seeing during all of that, but I saw the first--I don't know--I saw what happened after she was captured. When she cut off Haggar's bond. When she shut down so she didn't have to deal with everything Haggar threw at her. I don't know how long it was, but it felt like..."

He trailed off, and Pidge watched him from across the room, the light of their computer screen reflecting off their glasses. "It felt like... what?"

He shrugged again, cinching the blanket up toward his ears and resting his chin on his knees. "Nothing. It doesn't matter."

"Yes it does." After a moment, they shut their computer and set it aside. "How long did it feel like to you?"

Keith's eyes burned, and he turned his head to stare at the wall so he didn't have to look at Pidge. "I don't know. Ten thousand years? It wasn't _that_ long," he amended, because Pidge's breath had stalled out, and that made Keith's chest go tight. "It's just because it was so empty in there that it felt like forever. It probably wasn't more than a few years."

The edge of the mattress dipped as Pidge sat down--more than two feet from Keith, but his skin still crawled at their proximity, and he stared at them, wide-eyed, afraid they were going to close the distance, and hoping they would.

"You were alone all that time?"

"I mean... Red was there, kind of, but she was alone at the time, so it kind of felt like I was, too."

"Do... you want me to sit with you?"

Keith almost said no. He wanted to. His stomach was tying itself in knots already, and they weren't even within arm's reach.

He stopped himself, though, and then he nodded, because however much he dreaded their touch, he craved their company. He'd been alone for _so long._

They sat against the wall a few inches away and cautiously moved closer, hovering, like they knew how jumpy he was. Keith squirmed, forcing himself to remain where he was and not to flee the charge in the air where their hand reached out for his arm.

Their fingers brushed his arm, and he lowered his head, sinking his teeth into a fold of the blanket and biting down to keep from sobbing openly. Even now, the lightest touch felt like insects crawling beneath his skin, felt like oil and sludge seeping into his clothes and festering. Pidge snatched their hand back, but the phantom sensations lingered, worse now than before, because at least the touch had reminded him he wasn't alone.

"Don't," he said, his voice wet with the tears already soaking the hem of his blanket. "Don't--I can't--"

Pidge didn't respond for a long moment, and Keith thought he'd spoken too late. He hadn't felt the bed shift, but maybe they'd already gone. Maybe they'd left him alone again.

Another moment, and a pair of arms wrapped around his waist. Pidge wriggled between him and the wall, wedging themself into the narrow space, and for the first instant, Keith swore every nerve in his body had caught on fire. It was too much, that touch. It was actually painful.

But somewhere beyond the pain, it was like Pidge had turned a key in his chest. Something fell into place, and the warm, bony, restless body beside him was like the tether that anchored him to the ship as he drifted in the black.

"Is this better?"

Keith nodded, biting down on the blanket again to muffle the helpless keening sound that had settled into the back of his throat without his permission.

Pidge nodded, their hair brushing his cheek, and they settled in, tugging a second blanket up so that it covered them both. "I'm sorry," they whispered, turning their face into his shoulder.

He didn't tell them it was okay, because he wasn't honestly sure it was. But they were here, and they were present in a way that reverberated in every fiber of his being, and that made things closer to _okay_  than they'd been for a long, _long_  time.

* * *

Keith's emotional state for the next few days was... a work in progress. Pidge itched to tell the others what Keith had told them, but that first day, when Lance had come to take his shift in Keith's room and Pidge had reluctantly begun to disentangle themself from the nest they'd built in the corner, Keith's hand had lashed out and closed tight around Pidge's wrist.

"Don't tell him?"

It had hardly been a whisper, his voice cracking in a way that gave Pidge a fleeting glimpse of the desperation he was trying not to show. If not for that slip, Pidge probably would have broken down and told someone by now. Matt, at the very least. But every time they came close, they remembered the tremor in Keith's fingers, the way his wide eyes glowed yellow-green in the room's low light.

That wasn't to say the others couldn't put certain things together. Once Pidge discovered the secret of cuddling Keith (a simple secret, really; you just had to commit. Half-assed cuddles were no cuddles at all), the information was quick to spread. That much, Keith didn't seem to mind. Everyone who spent more than five minutes in his room eventually wound up in a tangle of limbs squeezed into roughly a quarter of the small bed. Even Nyma got roped into it, once, and Pidge wished they had a picture of the petrified look on her face when she wound up with a sleeping Keith on top of her, Val reclining against his other side and swiping through an ebook on her tablet.

He was still distant sometimes, though. Empty, almost, like his mind had wandered away somewhere and couldn't find its way back.

After ten thousand years of isolation, was that really any surprise?

Pidge tried not to think about that little detail, but for the most part they failed miserably. Logic said that Keith was probably exaggerating. Not maliciously, maybe not even knowingly, but he'd been in a bad spot for a long time, and in the absence of any concrete way to track the time, it had seemed to stretch on far longer than it really had. They'd tried not to pry, but they'd collected small details here and there, and they'd assembled them into a picture that was incomplete and unclear, but better than nothing.

Even at their most optimistic, Pidge still estimated Keith had lived through several weeks' worth of memories, and that was bad enough. But Pidge couldn't ever quite shake the feeling that their logic only said Keith's estimate was wrong because they couldn't conceive of ten thousand years. That maybe they should take Keith at his word. Maybe he knew better than them what had happened to him.

(They didn't like considering that possibility.)

After those first days, they started to re-adjust Keith to the usual light and noise of the rest of the castle. He tolerated larger groups better, too--still only three or four at a time, and not constantly, but he could follow the thread of conversation better, and he didn't shrink back whenever there were more than two other people in the room.

After a week, Keith started spending his days in the rec room, or down on the training deck. He didn't zone out when he was training, he said. It kept him focused, he said.

Pidge thought he just liked having a way to vent his frustration that didn't involve picking fights with his friends.

(He'd done that, once or twice, and looked so guilty in the aftermath that Pidge almost wanted to fight the team on his behalf, even when no one had done anything wrong.)

If the training deck was somewhere Keith went to be alone but still grounded, then the rec room was where he went when he was lonely and didn't want to have to say so out loud. There was always someone there when Keith was there. Multiple someones, most of the time. The team couldn't ignore the war altogether, of course, but they delegated more to the Guard than usual, and they put off personal crusades in favor of movie marathons and game nights and family dinners and anything else they could think up as an excuse to gather in the common room.

Keith lingered around the edges of these events, claiming one person as his pillow for the night and otherwise just watching things unfold. Aside from the cuddling, it was just about par for the course. Mostly. There were moments when Pidge expected Keith to step in with a snarky comeback or a blunt question that might have seemed rude if they weren't all so used to each others idiosyncrasies by now.

Instead, after a beat of awkward silence, the conversation moved on, and Pidge glanced to where Keith sat, curled up with Akira, or Matt, or Lance, or Shiro.

He was smiling, at least. He usually did, when they were all together like this. Sometimes it even reached his eyes. Still Pidge couldn't help feeling like there was something missing from that smile.

* * *

A week passed, then two. The nothingness retreated, those long, lonely stretches compacting until Keith could go almost an entire day without it sneaking up on him and swallowing him whole.

Keith wouldn't say he was okay. Not entirely. There were still moments when he felt like a foreigner among the other paladins, an impostor who had tricked his way into their good graces. There were still times that every touch, every sound, was an assault on his senses and he just wanted to go and curl up somewhere dark and quiet. There were times he wanted desperately to be alone and dreaded isolation at the same time.

He _was_  getting better, though. He was.

But there was one thing he'd been putting off, one thing he knew he needed to do before he could put this ordeal behind him.

"You sure you're ready to do this?" Matt asked. He hovered close to Keith's side, Akira mirroring him to Keith's left. They didn't touch--there was no good touching while walking; it was all too fleeting, too incidental, and it only sharpened the distance between them.

"I'm ready." There was a lot more Keith could have said, a lot he _wanted_  to say. The Red Lion had kept her distance ever since her flashback--she'd even pulled back from Matt, and he hadn't gotten caught up in it. But she was especially careful to give Keith's mind a wide berth, shying away from his attempts to reconnect.

Granted, he'd been hesitant each of those times, afraid of getting sucked back into her memories, and she could probably sense that. But he did _want_  to bridge the gap between them. 

So he went. Akira and Matt seemed to understand that this was something he needed to do, as they understood that he couldn't do it alone. His rational mind knew he wasn't going to get pulled back into the nothingness. Red had been lucid ever since they'd pulled Keith out of stasis, and even the other lions attested to that fact. And even if she _had_  relapsed, Keith was awake now. She couldn't pull him in.

That didn't quiet the fear entirely, though.

Even before they reached her hangar, he felt her. An ache in the air, a festering guilt that recognized him and retreated. A loneliness he understood so viscerally it stopped him in his tracks.

It consumed his attention, that loneliness. Dragged him down, clamped a vice around his heart, and left him gasping for air.

Akira's arms went around his shoulders from behind, and Keith drew in a ragged breath. "We don't have to do this now," Akira said. "You're allowed to wait until you're ready."

But Keith shook his head. He'd latched on Akira's arms, and he smiled at Matt, who hovered nearby, biting his lip. "This isn't about me."

He breathed a few more times, steadying himself. The tide of Red's loneliness pulled at him, but with Akira and Matt there, he weathered it, and slowly it lost its grip on him. He squeezed Akira's wrists, then stepped forward, leading the other two to the hangar door.

Red was inside, just where she always was, though Green had joined her. She kept doing that, apparently. It didn't matter how many times Pidge left Green in her own hangar; within a few hours, she inevitably found her way to Red. Eventually, Pidge had given up and started following Matt into Red's hangar after every mission.

Red remained impassive when Keith walked in, but Green lifted her head, watching the new arrivals as though trying to gauge their intent. She reminded Keith of Matt and Akira, who flanked Keith like a pair of personal guards watching for threats.

The pain was sharper here, more stifling, and Keith could feel Red scrambling to tuck it all away, where Keith didn't have to look at it. He'd been doing a lot of the same over the course of the last two weeks, and he smiled to himself, bittersweet, as he reminded himself that he wasn't the one who had actually had to suffer all that loneliness and pain.

He crossed the hangar, reaching out to Red first with his mind and then with a hand, which he rested atop her paw. It was a gentle touch, reverent in a way, and Keith was intimately aware of just how long she'd gone without that sort of touch before Matt had rescued her from Haggar.

"This isn't your fault," he told her. " _None_ of this was your fault."

He hesitated, fumbling with what he wanted to say. That he wouldn't leave her, not ever--but not the way Haggar refused to leave her. It wasn't about ownership; it was about trust, and Keith still trusted Red.

He just wanted her to be happy.

But words were as hard as they'd always been--harder, when he still hadn't found the words to tell the others exactly what he'd experienced. He could have searched all day and still not found the words, so he stopped searching and opened himself, letting down all the walls he'd thrown up in the wake of his ordeal. He hadn't meant to shut her out, but he had. He'd pushed her away as much as she'd pushed him, and now that he'd torn those walls down, he was vulnerable. He knew that.

So did Red. She shied away, fear flickering at the edges of Keith's awareness. But he'd found calm, and Red's misgivings couldn't shake him now.

Matt squeezed his arm. Akira curled a hand around the back of his neck. They must have sensed what he was doing, for they joined him, their minds twining with his own and reaching out for Red, who slowly unfurled toward Keith in return, reinforcing their connection.

They moment the gates opened, Keith staggered, gasping as Red's grief and pain returned in force. But as painful as it was, it was steadying, too. A reminder that he wasn't alone. The comfort of finding a kindred spirit. He thought it was the same for her.

He breathed, leaning forward until his forehead came to rest against her leg, and leaned his whole being into the touch. It was difficult to cuddle with a cat the size of a building, but that didn't mean he couldn't try. Keith thought she needed it as much as he did.

_I'm still here,_  he told her. _No matter what, I'll be here, for as long as you'll take me._


End file.
